Senior DevSecOps Engineer

About the role

IronArch Technology is seeking a Senior DevSecOps Engineer to support the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) RISE program. This role involves coordinating with engineering teams and partner programs to integrate with the program's Amazon MSK (Kafka) event bus, ensuring secure and efficient delivery pipelines, and operating and evolving AWS infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Guide teams integrating with the program's Amazon MSK (Kafka) event bus, from first design conversation through production cutover.
• Contribute to schema design, review, and governance for new producers and consumers, helping teams and vendors reach agreement.
• Coordinate cross-team and cross-program integration work, including consumers outside the immediate program that are adopting the event bus.
• Build and maintain secure, automated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar) that embed security scanning, testing, and compliance checks into every release.
• Champion DevSecOps practices across teams: secrets management, dependency and container scanning, least-privilege access, and auditable deployments.
• Ensure delivery practices align with VA security and compliance requirements.
• Operate and evolve AWS infrastructure supporting the event bus and related services, managed as Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Share responsibility for MSK cluster operations: capacity planning, topic and partition strategy, scaling, upgrades, and cost efficiency.
• Automate deployment, configuration management, and release processes.
• Partner with the program's observability effort to ensure streaming infrastructure and integrations are well instrumented: metrics, logging, alerting, and tracing.
• Support production operations for the event bus, including incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Help teams design consumers and producers for resiliency, replayability, and graceful failure.
• Collaborate with product owners, engineering leads, and VA stakeholders to sequence and deliver integration work.
• Operate effectively in a complex multi-vendor Federal program, building trust across organizational boundaries.
• Mentor engineers on event-driven architecture and DevSecOps practices.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent professional experience).
• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, DevSecOps, Cloud Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or Platform Engineering.
• Hands-on production experience with Amazon MSK and/or Apache Kafka: cluster operations, topic and partition design, schema management, and producer/consumer development or tuning.
• Demonstrated success guiding technical work that spans multiple teams: moving designs to agreement, unblocking integrations, and holding a quality bar.
• Strong experience with AWS cloud services; GovCloud experience preferred.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Experience designing or supporting event-driven architectures at enterprise scale.
• Experience supporting high-availability, mission-critical production environments.
• Strong understanding of DevSecOps principles and secure software delivery.
• Experience working within Agile software development environments.

Technical Skills

• Amazon MSK / Apache Kafka (required), including the surrounding ecosystem (Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, or equivalents)
• Event-driven architecture and streaming patterns
• AWS (GovCloud preferred)
• Terraform
• CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions preferred; GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent)
• Docker and containerization technologies
• Kubernetes or container orchestration platforms (preferred)
• Linux administration
• Performance monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, or similar)
• Git source control
• Scripting (Python, Bash, or similar)

Preferred Experience

• Experience supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs or other Federal agencies.
• Experience running Kafka or MSK as a shared platform consumed by multiple independent teams.
• Experience with schema governance and data contracts in event-driven systems.
• Experience implementing DevSecOps practices within Federal environments, including ATO and RMF processes.
• Experience with VA platform environments such as LHDI or GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
• Experience collaborating within complex multi-vendor Federal programs.
• AWS Professional, DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes, Terraform, or similar cloud certifications are highly desirable.
• Experience navigating a system from a FISMA Moderate to a FISMA High baseline, including the control uplift and re-authorization work that comes with it.

Clearance Requirements

• U.S. Citizenship is required.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust suitability determination.
• Candidates with an active Public Trust or recently completed Federal background investigation are strongly preferred to support accelerated onboarding.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• The ideal candidate is a senior engineer who is happiest at the seam between teams.
• You have run Kafka in production, you know what good schema discipline looks like, and you can help walk a team from "we want to publish events" to a healthy production integration.
• You collaborate well with the DevSecOps engineers working alongside you, you communicate clearly with engineers and stakeholders alike, you write things down, and you raise the platform's quality bar with every integration you support.
• You thrive in Agile, multi-vendor environments and care about security as a property of the delivery process, not a gate at the end.

Impact / Success

• In your first year, you will have made a meaningful impact when:
• New producer and consumer teams onboard to the event bus through a clear, repeatable integration path that you helped build and continuously improve.
• Schema design and governance are established practices, with cross-team agreements reached quickly and documented durably.
• Delivery pipelines for the platform and its integrations are secure, automated, and auditable.
• The event bus runs reliably as adoption grows, with observability and incident practices that catch problems before consumers do.
• You are a trusted integration advisor across the program and its partner teams.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and market-leading bonus opportunities
• Medical, dental and vision benefits where a significant portion of the premium is subsidized by IronArch.
• Health Reimbursement Account for eligible medical expenses
• 401(k) retirement plan where the company contributes dollar for dollar up to 3 percent, and 50 cents on the dollar for the 4th and 5th percent with immediate entry and immediate vesting
• 20 days of PTO accumulated per calendar year
• 11 paid holidays
• Bereavement, jury duty, parental (maternity/paternity/adoption), and military leaves
• Sabbatical programs
• Company-paid short- and long-term disability
• Company-paid life insurance
• Voluntary life, accidental and indemnity income replacement benefits
• Professional development reimbursement
• Health club reimbursement
• Matching donation program and annual philanthropic activities
• Pet insurance