Software Engineer (MID)

About the role

The Alaka`ina Foundation Family of Companies (FOCs) is seeking a qualified Software Engineer to support a government customer at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The role focuses on building DevOps, MLOps, and GitOps infrastructure for AI/ML applications that digitize, OCR, and analyze massive datasets—including over 20,000 films, two million photographs, and 60 million pages of documents dating back to the Manhattan Project. You will work with a team of software engineers, data scientists, and application architects to create containerized microservices, implement CI/CD pipelines for model deployment, establish monitoring and observability for ML services, manage secrets and configurations, and build self‑healing, scalable systems that enable searchable APIs for text, image, and video analysis. The Alaka`ina Foundation also supports youth of Hawaii through educational programs that combine leadership, science & technology, and environmental stewardship.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain infrastructure supporting digitization, OCR, and machine learning analysis of massive datasets.
• Build DevOps, MLOps, and GitOps workflows to manage application and model deployments.
• Create containerized microservices for document processing.
• Establish monitoring systems for ML pipelines that extract metadata from historical documents and generate time‑series data from image analysis.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code to support transformer model deployments.
• Establish blue‑green deployments for video analysis services.
• Create automated testing pipelines for image summarization and captioning systems.
• Build search infrastructure and APIs that make AI‑powered analyses discoverable and accessible.
• Implement observability across distributed ML services.
• Manage secrets and configurations.
• Build self‑healing systems that automatically scale based on processing demands.

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years relevant DevOps/Software Engineering experience OR 2+ years relevant DevOps/Software Engineering experience with a relevant degree (e.g., Computer Science, Software Engineering).
• Ability to obtain CompTIA Security+ Certification within 6 weeks of starting.

Required Skills and Experience

• Four plus (4+) years relevant experience OR Two plus (2+) years with relevant degree (e.g., Comp Sci, Math).
• Strong Python development skills with experience in ML/data processing libraries (pandas, scikit‑learn, etc.) and web frameworks (Fast API, Flask).
• JavaScript (Next.js) proficiency for API development and frontend tooling.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.).
• Container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes.