Devops Contractor Jobs in Washington, DC (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Koch is seeking an experienced DevOps Prime to oversee the DevOps function across their platform portfolio. This role is responsible for managing vendor resources, ensuring cloud infrastructure health, and setting technical direction for CI/CD and operational readiness.
Responsibilities:
• Provide day-to-day technical direction to DevOps resources at Intive and CyberCommand, ensuring their work aligns with GCH architecture, security, and operational standards.
• Define clear scopes of work, deliverables, and acceptance criteria for vendor-led infrastructure and DevOps initiatives.
• Review vendor work product (Terraform, pipelines, runbooks, IaC modules) for quality, consistency, and adherence to GCH conventions before it reaches production.
• Track contractor utilization and output, surfacing under-performance, scope creep, or coverage gaps to engineering leadership.
• Serve as the primary GCH-side counterpart for Intive and CyberCommand DevOps leads, owning the working relationship and escalation path.
• Own the GCH AWS footprint across SCR, UBID, and RBM, including API Gateway, RDS, Lambda, QuickSight, Synthetics, and supporting services.
• Maintain and evolve infrastructure-as-code standards (Terraform or equivalent), ensuring environments are reproducible, version-controlled, and auditable.
• Drive cost visibility and optimization across all environments, with regular reporting to engineering leadership.
• Own cloud security posture in partnership with security stakeholders, including IAM, network controls, secrets management, and compliance requirements tied to CTIA and future Koch integrations.
• Own the Auth0 tenant configuration and operational health across all GCH platforms, including connections, rules, actions, and tenant-level security posture.
• Manage customer identity provider (IdP) integrations, including SAML and OIDC federations with enterprise customers connecting their corporate directories to GCH platforms.
• Partner with Product and Customer Success on onboarding workflows for new customer IdP federations, establishing repeatable processes that reduce integration time and support burden.
• Maintain documentation, templates, and standards that make customer IdP onboarding predictable for both GCH and the customer's identity team.
• Own the end-to-end CI/CD strategy across all three product lines, including build, test, deploy, and rollback workflows.
• Establish and enforce deployment standards, gating, and change management practices that align with QA acceptance gates and release readiness reviews.
• Drive deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate improvements as core operational KPIs.
• Define and maintain the observability stack (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) so engineering and operations have clear, real-time visibility into platform health.
• Establish SLOs and operational dashboards aligned with the contractual SLAs GCH owes CTIA and other partners.
• Lead infrastructure-related incident response, post-incident reviews, and remediation tracking. Ensure runbooks and on-call procedures are current and actionable.
• Partner with Engineering, QA, Product, and Customer Success to ensure infrastructure decisions support release velocity, quality gates, and customer-facing reliability.
• Coordinate with billing infrastructure stakeholders (Chargebee, Stripe) on environment, deployment, and operational concerns.
• Support executive and partner-facing communications related to platform infrastructure, SLA performance, and operational posture.
• Provide input into long-range planning for the eventual build-out of an in-house GCH DevOps team.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 7+ years of progressive DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering experience, including 3+ years in a DevOps leadership or technical lead role.
• Demonstrated experience directing or overseeing DevOps work performed by external or offshore contractors and vendors.
• Deep hands-on AWS expertise, including IAM, VPC networking, API Gateway, RDS, Lambda, CloudWatch, and cost management.
• Hands-on experience administering Auth0 (or a comparable enterprise identity platform such as Okta or Ping), including tenant configuration, rules/actions, and connection management.
• Demonstrated experience managing customer-facing IdP integrations using SAML and OIDC, including enterprise federation onboarding.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code background (Terraform preferred; CloudFormation or Pulumi acceptable).
• Proven ownership of CI/CD pipelines at scale (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CodePipeline, or comparable).
• Solid background in observability and incident response, including establishing SLOs, alerting strategies, and on-call practices.
• Experience operating SaaS or B2B platforms under contractual SLAs.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to set technical direction for contractors and translate operational data into clear narratives for executives and partners.
Preferred:
• Fluency in Spanish is a strong plus, as many standup meetings and working sessions with our development partner are conducted in Spanish.
• Experience in the telecom, messaging, or wireless industry (short codes, A2P/P2P messaging, RCS/RBM, carrier integrations).
• Experience supporting billing and payments infrastructure (Stripe, Chargebee, or comparable).
• Experience preparing infrastructure for enterprise integrations or M&A-driven system consolidations.
• Background with security and compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or carrier-driven security requirements).
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) or equivalent.
Company:
Based in Wichita, Kansas, Koch is one of the largest private companies in America. Founded in 1940, the company is headquartered in Wichita, USA, with a team of 10001+ employees. The company is currently Late Stage.