Junior Platform Engineer Jobs in Washington (NOW HIRING)

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.

Platform Engineer Role Description: Core Competencies

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

Containerization & Orchestration

Proficient with Docker and containerization best practices, along with advanced knowledge of Kubernetes primitives like Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Persistent Volumes, and Namespaces.

Networking:

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.

Security:

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.

Performance & Optimization

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

Troubleshooting

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

CI/CD Tooling:

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

Pipeline Design & Implementation:

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

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

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

Automation Scripting:

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

GitOps Methodologies

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

Monitoring & Alerting:

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

Logging & Tracing:

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

DevOps & SRE Principles:

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

Version Control

Expert in Git and collaborative development workflows.

Testing

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

Linux/Unix:

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

Networking Concepts:

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

Leadership Problem-Solving

Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues in distributed systems.

Communication

Strong verbal and written communication skills to collaborate effectively with development teams, operations, security, and other stakeholders. Collaboration: Ability to work effectively in a team environment, mentor junior engineers, and lead technical initiatives.

Proactive & Ownership

Proactive approach to identifying and addressing potential issues, with a strong sense of ownership over the platform.

Adaptability & Continuous Learning:

Eagerness to learn new technologies and adapt to a rapidly evolving cloud-native landscape.

Additional Skills & Requirements

• Relevant certifications (e.g., CKA, CKAD, CKS, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert).
• Experience with specific Kubernetes operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), or building internal developer platforms (IDPs).
• Travel up to 20% of the time, as required, to perform on-site installations, maintenance, and troubleshooting activities at customer sites or data centers.

Clearance Requirements

Active TS/SCI clearance with Counterintelligence polygraph.

Have current IAM Level II to satisfy DOD 8570 IAT.