Automation Engineer

About Us

We are Skyward—a people-centered business with a desire to serve others through information technology. We are diverse and unified; creative and collaborative; a collection of complementary talents driven by a civic tech mission. Our values define us:

• Integrity: We’re conscientious, intentional, and empathetic. Our words and actions align.
• Compassionate: We care deeply for each other, our clients, and our work.
• Inquisitive: We remain students by failing openly and turning lessons into solutions.
• Unconventional: Work happens inside of life, and our culture erases the line dividing the two.
• Authentic: We’re relaxed and fun yet intensely curious and driven.

This position is contingent on contract award.

About the Role

Do you look at a repetitive, manual task and feel a physical urge to automate it out of existence? Do you get a thrill when a pipeline runs green, an alert self-heals before anyone notices, and a server provisions itself from a few lines of code? If you speak fluent Infrastructure as Code, dream in Python, and believe that a well-tuned AIOps platform is a beautiful thing, then join us in modernizing enterprise IT operations for a federal customer. Bring automation, orchestration, and machine-assisted intelligence to infrastructure that people rely on every day.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation/ARM) so environments provision themselves consistently, repeatably, and without 2 a.m. surprises.
• Design and deploy Robotic Process Automation (RPA) workflows that eliminate soul-crushing, repetitive tasks.
• Stand up and tune AIOps and observability platforms (e.g., Splunk ITSI, Dynatrace, Datadog, Moogsoft/BigPanda, ScienceLogic) to correlate events, spot anomalies, and trigger auto-remediation before small problems become big ones.
• Automate across AWS, Azure, and on-prem environments—because the real world is hybrid.
• Write clean, reusable scripts in Python, PowerShell, and Bash to make everyone's life easier.
• Plug automation into CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps toolchains for fast, reliable, secure delivery.
• Support 24x7 operations by engineering monitoring, orchestration, and backup/recovery tooling to keep availability high and downtime low.
• Keep systems patched, hardened, and compliant, helping remediate vulnerabilities and apply security updates on schedule.
• Document your automation and track error-reduction and efficiency wins to showcase the impact.
• Collaborate with engineers, network teams, and developers to hunt down manual toil and replace it with smarter solutions.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field.
• At least 3 years of relevant experience.
• Solid hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Automation expertise: RPA, orchestration, and scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash).
• Cloud fluency across AWS and/or Azure, with comfort in hybrid on-prem environments.
• Experience with monitoring, observability, or AIOps platforms and the ability to turn noisy alerts into useful signals.
• Working knowledge of ITIL service management and how automation fits into change, patch, and vulnerability management.
• Familiarity with federal security frameworks (FISMA, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP) or eagerness to learn them quickly.
• A curious, problem-solving mindset and a collaborative attitude that makes the team better.

Nice-to-Haves

• Certifications like AWS/Azure Associate-or-above, Terraform Associate, or ITIL 4.
• Experience building self-healing automation that reduced incidents, with metrics to prove it.
• Prior experience supporting a federal or DHS environment.
• A sense of humor—you know how to light up the room (or the Slack channel).

Even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications, we encourage you to apply. We’re focused on hiring individuals with the right skills and passion to grow.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 15 days of paid leave + 7 days of sick leave + 11 paid Federal holidays.
• 2 days of bereavement leave + up to 40 hours for jury duty.
• 401K with 4% employer contribution (no vesting period).
• Up to 4 weeks of paid paternity and maternity leave.
• Company-provided laptop.
• $5,000 per year for professional development.
• $600 per year for technical supplies and equipment.
• $2,000 referral bonus.
• Life and disability insurance + HSA and FSA options.
• Legal Shield and ID Shield voluntary benefits.

Pay

$86,000 - $95,000 a year. We ensure our compensation is competitive, fair, and transparent, as required by Maryland law.

Schedule

Flexible working hours and remote opportunities to support work-life balance.

Offers of employment are contingent upon acceptable results of a background investigation. Applicants must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust security clearance due to the nature of our work as a government contractor.