Kubernetes Engineer

Overview

Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. (SPA) delivers high-impact, technical solutions to complex national security issues. As we enter our 50th year in business, we remain committed to our reputation of continuous innovation for government customers, both long-established and newly acquired, as our capabilities expand around the globe. Our work is state-of-the-art and made possible only through the best personnel, tools, and jobs in the national security business. We are highly collaborative in spirit and practice, and we freely share expertise across SPA in our quest to deliver enduring solutions for our customers most critical concerns. Come work with the best!

SPA provides multiple organizations within the Department of Defense with timely and objective assessments, recommendations, and solutions – driven by integrated technical, operational, programmatic, policy, and business analyses. We focus on key clients in the space community, including Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC). Our goal is to consistently deliver and execute data-driven solutions that align with the SSC mission and strategic vision.

SPA has a near-term need for a Kubernetes Engineer.

Responsibilities

As a Kubernetes Engineer at SPA, you will support SSC’s Software Factory, also known as Kobayashi Maru. Kobayashi Maru is responsible for continuously delivering impactful software for space operations. The Factory’s mission includes the development and deployment of software for space defense, space domain awareness, and enabling data services.

You will become part of Kobayashi Maru’s Information Technology and Enterprise Services team responsible for leveraging Kubernetes technology to deliver, install, upgrade, patch and maintain highly reliable and resilient solutions for deploying and hosting current and future tools and services needed to develop, test, secure, and ship software applications to production. The Information Technology and Enterprise Services team operates within an Agile framework including daily stand up, welcomes feedback often, sprint/iteration planning, duration planning, retrospectives, executing from the product backlog and roadmap, meeting performance metrics, and reporting on progress and blockers. The Information Technology and Enterprise Services team is completely customer-focused and strives to exceed service level agreements, specifications, and parameters.

Key duties and responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:

Securing and configuring containerized services orchestrated with Kubernetes and its underlying environment;

Tuning Kubernetes performance and identifying problems by using service and traffic metrics by establishing monitoring and alerting dashboards;

Perform as the lead for the lifecycle management of all containerized services used in the development of Kobayashi Maru software;

Lead the troubleshooting for containerized-services and publishing root cause analysis (RCAs) and postmortems with the larger portfolio;

Establish Service Level Objectives and other Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) related metrics;

Manage the north-south and east-west network traffic to ensure all container-based critical services are maintained;

Ensure the Kubernetes environment is running as it should, properly patched and configured, has sufficient resources to run the required applications, and can scale as needed without being overprovisioned.

With automation and an ‘everything as code’ mentality, you will design, secure, deploy, and manage the Kubernetes environment required to support 14 software product teams and thousands of users across the test, IL4 development, IL6 staging/production, and higher classification level stagging/production environments. You will be 100% ‘roll up your sleeves, hands on keyboard’ ensuring all things Kubernetes are running in accordance with Kobayashi Maru’s needs. You will collaborate with the team in achieving the goals, objectives, and deadlines set by the Government Platform and Infrastructure Portfolio Lead, Chief Technology Officer, and Information Technology and Enterprise Services Product Manager.

This is a hybrid position. You will be expected to work on-site with the Government customer in El Segundo, CA at least 2-3 days per month due to the occasional need to access secure networks.

Qualifications

Minimum Required Qualifications

Possess U.S. Citizenship

Minimum 5 years of professional experience as a Kubernetes Engineer, successfully designing and building distributed systems for mid to large enterprises, including 2 years of SRE experience

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, STEM, or IT from an accredited institution

Possession of a current Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification, or equivalent

Your resume must demonstrate experience:

Delivering container orchestration solutions to leverage the full value of container technology

Designing, building, and implementing cloud-native architectures with Kubernetes

Maintaining, configuring, and monitoring containers using Infrastructure as Code principles in the development, test, and production environment

Designing containerized solutions for relational/non-relational databases, data auditing, caching, and performance

Implementing observability solutions, key metrics to monitor, and establishing monitoring foundation

Troubleshooting and conducting root cause analysis to address routine to moderately complex issues with accuracy and performance

Deploying and managing micro-services using container orchestration platforms

Automating system tasks and infrastructure using a scripting language, with configuration management tools, service registry and discovery tools, infrastructure orchestration tools, and automated imaging tools

Using and optimizing monitoring and trending systems, log aggregation systems, and their agents

Proficiently using one or more of the following tools: Argo CD, cert-manager, Ingress, Keycloak, MinIO, MongoDB, Pinniped, Prometheus, Grafana, VMWare Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Sealed Secrets, Tanzu Postgres and Operator, Vault, Velero/Restic, Harbor, Kustomize, Jira, Confluence, Gitlab and Helm

Desired Qualifications:

Active Secret clearance

At SPA, we strive to deliver a robust total compensation package that will attract and retain top talent. Elements of the compensation package include competitive base pay and variable compensation opportunities.

SPA provides eligible employees with an opportunity to enroll in a variety of benefit programs, generally including health insurance, flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, retirement savings plans, life and disability insurance programs, and a number of programs that provide for both paid and unpaid time away from work.

The specific programs and options available to any given employee may vary depending on eligibility factors such as geographic location, date of hire, etc.

Please note that the salary information shown below is a general guideline only. Salaries are commensurate with experience and qualifications, as well as market and business considerations. California PayTransparency Range: 170k - 245k