Platform Engineer

PLATFORM ENGINEER (CI Poly Required)

• Chantilly, VA
• Information Technology

SSA LLC has an exciting opportunity for a Platform Engineer to support a Federal Program in Chantilly, VA. This is a direct-hire role with our client, a highly respected firm in the Intelligence Community. The ideal candidate will have 3-6 years of relevant experience. Due to the nature of the work, a TS/SCI Clearance and CI Polygraph required.

Technical Cluster Management:
Extensive experience designing, deploying, securing, maintaining, and upgrading highly available, scalable Kubernetes clusters (e.g., EKS, AKS, GKE, Open Shift, or self-managed). This includes understanding control plane components, worker nodes, and their interactions.

Proficient with Docker and containerization best practices, along with advanced knowledge of Kubernetes primitives like Pods, Deployments, Stateful Sets, Services, Ingress, Config Maps, Secrets, Persistent Volumes, and Name spaces.

Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking concepts (CNI plugins like Calico or Cilium), network policies, service meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), and DNS within and outside the cluster.

Expertise in securing Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, Pod Security Policies/Admission Controllers, vulnerability scanning, secret management (e.g., Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and network security.

Ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues within Kubernetes, optimize resource utilization, and implement best practices for cluster tuning.

Advanced troubleshooting skills for identifying and resolving issues across the entire Kubernetes stack, from infrastructure to application-level problems.

Hands-on experience with popular CI/CD platforms like Jenkins, Git Lab CI/CD, Git Hub Actions, Tekton, Argo Workflows, or similar.

Ability to design, implement, and maintain robust, automated CI/CD pipelines for deploying containerized applications to Kubernetes, adhering to best practices like Git Ops.

Proficiency with IaC tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Cloud Formation for provisioning and managing infrastructure declaratively. Experience with Helm charts and Kustomize for Kubernetes application packaging and deployment.

Strong scripting skills in languages like Python, Go, Bash, or similar, for automating tasks, creating custom tooling, and integrating various systems.

Practical experience with Git Ops workflows and tools like Argo CD for automated deployments and continuous delivery.

Experience implementing and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions for Kubernetes clusters and applications (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack/Open Search, Datadog, Splunk).

Familiarity with centralized logging solutions and distributed tracing for effective debugging and performance analysis.

Deep understanding of Dev Ops culture, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, and “you build it, you run it” philosophy.

Expert in Git and collaborative development workflows.

Understanding of various testing methodologies (unit, integration, end-to-end) within the context of platform and pipeline development.

Strong background in Linux system administration, including networking, file systems, process management, and troubleshooting.

Solid understanding of core networking protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, Load Balancing).

Excellent analytical and…