Senior Api Developer Jobs in Washington (NOW HIRING)

POSITION OVERVIEW

The Senior Platform Engineer stands up, automates, and sustains the infrastructure the Customer's enterprise API gateway runs on. The role covers container platform engineering, infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, and the observability and high-availability work that keeps the gateway serving production traffic through upgrades, patch cycles, and failures. It is the platform counterpart to the security and application seats on the same team. This position requires an active Moderate Background Investigation (MBI) suitability determination at start.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Deploy and operate the gateway control and data planes on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift — namespaces, RBAC, quotas, ingress and routes, rolling updates
• Automate installation, configuration, upgrade, and patching with Helm, Terraform, and Ansible, delivered as reusable modules rather than one-off scripts
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins or GitHub Actions with artifact management, image scanning, and approval gates under Government change control
• Manage declarative gateway configuration as code and promote it across environment tiers with tested rollback
• Architect multi-AZ high availability and disaster recovery for the gateway tier and its datastores
• Provision and maintain supporting cloud infrastructure — VPC design, subnets and routing, security groups, managed databases, backups, encryption
• Automate certificate lifecycle, mutual TLS, and secrets handling for platform components
• Build observability across metrics, logs, and traces with dashboards and alerting tied to service objectives
• Establish performance and capacity baselines, load test the gateway tier, and tune for throughput and latency
• Maintain runbooks, SOPs, and design artifacts sufficient for Government and follow-on staff to sustain the platform

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Active MBI suitability determination, current and transferable as of your start date
• U.S. citizenship, as required for Customer contractor personnel
• Eight years of hands-on platform, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure engineering in production, including three years supporting a Federal system subject to FISMA
• Production operation of Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, including cluster resources, ingress controllers, operators, and Helm
• Infrastructure-as-code at scale with Terraform and Ansible, including reusable modules and version-controlled state
• Ownership of enterprise CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab, with artifact repositories and security scanning integrated
• AWS-native architecture across VPC, EC2 or EKS, IAM, S3, RDS, Lambda, and CloudWatch, or equivalent depth in another major cloud
• Demonstrated design and operation of multi-AZ, high-availability services meeting a stated availability commitment
• Observability engineering with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, AppDynamics, OpenTelemetry, or the ELK stack
• Linux administration on RHEL, shell or Python scripting, and troubleshooting at the OS and network layer
• Certificate and secrets handling for platform services — TLS and mutual TLS, key rotation, and a secrets management platform
• Experience promoting configuration through Government-controlled environments under formal change control
• Technical documentation — design artifacts, runbooks, and SDLC deliverables that hold up under Government review
• Agile or Scrum delivery alongside Government product owners and multiple contractor teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Information Systems, or equivalent hands-on experience

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• An active vendor certification on the program's API gateway platform, or willingness to earn it within 90 days of start with training provided
• An active platform certification such as CKA, Red Hat OpenShift, AWS Solutions Architect, Terraform Associate, or ITIL v4
• Prior support to a Federal financial or tax administration program
• GitOps delivery with Argo CD, and service mesh exposure such as Istio
• Messaging and integration middleware such as Kafka, IBM MQ, ActiveMQ, or webMethods
• Zero Trust implementation — mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, MFA, PIV, and LDAP/AD or Kerberos integration
• Supporting ATO and continuous monitoring from the platform side — scan remediation and evidence collection