Entry Level App Developer Jobs in Washington (NOW HIRING)

Entry-level role on the Northwood Infrastructure team. Broad exposure across the stack with guided growth into one or more areas of depth.

Responsibilities

• Learn the Northwood stack in depth — AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Vault, observability, networking — and identify one or more areas to go deeper in over time.
• Execute scoped infrastructure tasks. With guidance from senior engineers, execute work that is reviewed and merged without significant rework.
• Contribute to infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, observability configuration, and operational tooling across the stack.
• Shadow on-call rotations. Triage incidents and escalate as needed to senior engineers.
• Participate in post-incident reviews to build operational judgment.
• Write clear runbooks, component docs, and design notes for work you own. Documentation is part of the deliverable.
• Pair with senior engineers on larger projects to build pattern recognition for how infrastructure decisions are made and tradeoffs evaluated.

Basic Qualifications

• 0-2 years of professional experience in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, SRE, networking, or systems engineering.
• Strong interest in infrastructure engineering and a clear willingness to go deep on one or more facets of the stack.
• Working familiarity with Linux, networking, and at least one major cloud provider.
• Some experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar) and version control with Git.
• Comfortable reading and writing code in at least one language (Python, Go, Bash, or similar).
• Strong written communication. Able to describe problems, document work, and ask good questions.

Preferred Qualifications

A demonstrated interest in one or more of the following through coursework, side projects, prior internships, or homelab work. We're looking for genuine curiosity and a track record of following through on learning.

• Networking — enterprise, site, or core (Routing, VPNs, firewalls, switching)
• Security engineering — Vault, identity and access management, SIEM, hardening
• Compliance — CMMC, FedRAMP, NIST 800-171, ITAR
• Observability — Prometheus or VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, log pipelines
• App platform — Kubernetes, Podman, ArgoCD, GitOps
• CI/CD — pipeline design, scanning and linting, release engineering
• Cloud architecture — AWS, GovCloud, Cloudflare
• On-prem and edge — bringing up systems in remote or austere environments

Additional Information

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Northwood is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.