Staff DevOps Engineer

About the role

Northrop Grumman’s Space Sector is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to support on-premises mission systems by operating, maintaining, and incrementally enhancing existing DevOps and platform solutions.

Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain existing GitLab CI/CD infrastructure including patching and permissions.
• Advises on updates to jobs, runners, variables, and approvals to improve stability and throughput.
• Administers Nexus artifact repositories including patching, backups, access management, repository configuration, cleanup/retention policies, and routine health checks.
• Maintains Apache NiFi infrastructure including patching, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and implementing changes defined by senior engineers.
• Supports installation and day-to-day operations of Kubernetes on-prem clusters, including patching, storage management, deployments, rollouts/rollbacks, configuration updates, and resource adjustments.
• Maintains and extends monitoring and alerting using Grafana and Prometheus for on-prem infrastructure and applications, including patching, access control, refining dashboards, alert rules, and service onboarding within existing observability patterns.
• Implements incremental improvements to existing DevOps tooling and workflows (e.g., adding tests, improving pipeline stages, automating manual steps) consistent with established designs and security baselines.
• Performs routine incident response and problem resolution for build, deployment, and runtime issues across CI/CD, Kubernetes, Nexus, NiFi, and supporting services.
• Applies existing security and compliance controls across the DevOps toolchain: secrets management, access controls, certificate and credential rotation, image scanning, and log retention in accordance with program requirements.
• Follows formal change management processes, including documenting changes, participating in reviews, and updating runbooks, SOPs, and technical documentation.
• Collaborates with senior engineers, system administrators, and developers to implement improvements and operational changes defined by leads and architects.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s in STEM degree with 12 years of professional experience; Master’s in STEM degree with 10 years of professional experience; PhD with 7 years of experience.
• Will consider an additional 4+ years of experience in lieu of degree.
• Requires an active Top-Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance at time of application.
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain U.S. Government Full Scope Polygraph.
• Relevant DevOps, site reliability, or systems engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience maintaining GitLab CI/CD in an on-prem environment.
• Practical experience administering Nexus repositories.
• Experience supporting Apache NiFi infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of on-prem Kubernetes operations.
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in an on-prem context.
• Proficiency with Linux systems administration fundamentals and at least one scripting language (e.g., Bash, Python) for automation and operational tasks.
• Familiarity with operating in secure, classified, or highly regulated on-prem environments and adherence to associated processes (security, configuration control, and auditing).
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills; ability to methodically diagnose issues across multiple interconnected services.

Qualifications

• Relevant DevOps, site reliability, or systems engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience maintaining GitLab CI/CD in an on-prem environment.
• Practical experience administering Nexus repositories.
• Experience supporting Apache NiFi infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of on-prem Kubernetes operations.
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in an on-prem context.
• Proficiency with Linux systems administration fundamentals and at least one scripting language (e.g., Bash, Python) for automation and operational tasks.
• Familiarity with operating in secure, classified, or highly regulated on-prem environments and adherence to associated processes (security, configuration control, and auditing).
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills; ability to methodically diagnose issues across multiple interconnected services.

Skills

• Experience using Helm and Rancher.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) for maintaining existing on-prem infrastructure definitions and playbooks.
• Experience with log aggregation and analysis platforms in on-prem environments (e.g., ELK/EFK or similar).
• Experience working within formal change control and release management processes.
• Exposure to microservices running on Kubernetes and related operational patterns (service discovery, scaling, health checks).

Benefits

This position is contingent upon the candidate obtaining final clearances and program access(es) within a reasonable period of time as determined by the company.