Lead DevOps Engineer

About the role

Pelico runs as an elegant set of ~20 microservices that deploy on a single VM and scale to Kubernetes for the enterprise. As we grow in the US, our most important deployments are also our hardest: aerospace and defense customers who run Pelico on their own air-gapped, on-premise infrastructure — where their IT team operates the product and we have no access to the cluster, the logs, or the data.

You'll own that frontier. You'll lead a small DevOps team (≈3–5) and own how Pelico is packaged, deployed, and operated in environments we can't see — so a customer's IT team can stand it up, run it, diagnose it, and recover it on their own, while we still hit every commitment we make.

This is a player-coach role: hands-on in the infrastructure, in the room with customer IT, and accountable for delivery.

Over the next 12–18 months you'll drive two co-primary tracks:

• The on-prem deployment frontier — tooling and packaging that get Pelico's current and committed enterprise customers live and self-operable, repeatably, not bespoke.
• A federal posture, standing up GovCloud / FedRAMP (controls as code) so Pelico can serve federal and defense customers on certified infrastructure.

The federal track is the most probable near-term direction, not a distant maybe.

Preferred Qualifications & Skills

• A track record operating enterprise software in environments you didn't fully control — customer-owned / on-prem / air-gapped — or equivalent depth standing up regulated / government-cloud (GovCloud / FedRAMP) environments (deep experience in either counts; the other is a fast ramp).
• Deep, current hands-on Kubernetes + Helm + Terraform/IaC and Docker/Compose; managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS/AKS) and on-prem/bare-metal.
• Observability you can ship into places you can't reach — Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk; designing diagnostics and remediation for customer self-operation.
• A record of owning committed enterprise deliverables end-to-end with customer IT — RACI, SLAs, checkpoints, scope — and hitting the dates.
• Leading by example — you set the bar by doing; ideally you've managed ~3+ engineers, or you're an exceptional hands-on tech lead ready to build and run a small team.
• Comfort treating security & operability as infrastructure — you've operated in regulated, customer-owned, or on-prem environments and design for auditability and self-service.

Nice To Have

• GovCloud and/or FedRAMP experience (strongly preferred / expected) — AWS GovCloud / Azure Government / GCP Assured Workloads, or having taken a system through FedRAMP (Moderate/High), IL, or CMMC authorization.
• Aerospace / defense / government / regulated on-prem experience; air-gap or ITAR/EAR exposure.
• A real self-service / platform-engineering philosophy (golden paths, self-remediation).
• AI-native ways of working — scoped tasks, heavy context, retained ownership.
• Secrets management, backup/DR, upgrade/migration tooling for disconnected sites; Fargate/ECS.

What We Offer

• A real ownership mandate over Pelico's hardest, highest-stakes deployments, with equity in a category-defining scale-up.
• Deep, high-leverage problems with real enterprise customers — and the autonomy to solve them your way.
• An AI-native engineering culture and a small, elite team — be challenged, learn, and have fun.
• A foothold in Pelico's growing US presence, an international team of 40+ nationalities, and a real commitment to fair pay and equal opportunity.