Systems Engineer with Defense Unicorns

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

More about us:

What We Do:

• We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery.
• Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners.
• Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve:

• Defense Unicorns' customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises.
• We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On:

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure) 
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi) 
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

As a Senior Software Systems Engineer, you will be responsible for delivering mission critical infrastructure and ensuring the highest levels of availability, performance, and security. Overseeing and creating patterns and behaviors that lead to more reliable and available systems.

The role needs experienced engineers with excellent cross-functional and communication skills as well as backgrounds in operations, software development, systems performance, and resilience engineering.

What You'll Be Responsible For:

• Leading/mentoring a technical team of Defense Unicorns engineers for our Department of Defense (DoD) projects
• Overseeing and creating patterns and behaviors that lead to more reliable and available systems
• Building a self-service continuous delivery platform to support application development teams
• Evangelizing DevOps principles and practices to help teams achieve new levels of productivity and safety
• Productizing solutions for reuse across Defense Unicorns' mission heroes
• Evaluating emerging tech and making determinations and recommendations for integrating with existing Defense Unicorns products to improve mission impact
• Interacting and engaging in an all-remote environment
• Collaborating with a diverse team of engineers responsible for delivering and maintaining applications in production
• Communicating effectively to mission heroes, unicorn engineers, leadership and other stakeholders to meet key milestones, validate direction and new feature work, raise issues/blockers and ensure they are resolved
• Working with other senior engineers to create new products, features, and improvements to existing products based on mission hero needs
• Managing projects from start to finish, including planning, developing, testing, release versioning, and existing version support. Projects could include:
  • Building and maintaining DevSecOps tooling for Kubernetes workloads (CI/CD, IaC, GitOps, pipelines, automation, etc)
  • Migrating legacy applications to cloud or Kubernetes environments and integration with service mesh, security, policy and observability tooling
  • Instrumenting observability stacks for centralized management of multi-cluster environments
  • Contributing to robust open-source projects
  • Participate in code and architecture reviews for cross-company, cross-team products
• Leading/actively engaging in deep technical design discussions within your team and across partner teams to ensure that we're building the right systems and keeping the quality high
• Building tools and products to automate repeatable processes for use by engineers
• Evaluating emerging tech to determine if it can be integrated into existing products to improve their impact and value
• Transitioning Proof of Concept to proof of value to create mission hero delight and engagement to full product offerings
• Maturing engineering process and procedures, as well as, solidifying architecture to support resiliency, scalability and security to support production workloads and environments
• Communicating effectively to mission heroes, colleagues, leadership and other stakeholders through the product development lifecycle, validate direction and new feature work, raise issues/blockers and ensure they are resolved
• Navigating the engineering tradespace to balance mission focus, security, value delivery and timelines by collaborating with engineers, product managers, mission managers and mission heroes
• Working in a remote team or asynchronous work environment with cross-functional teams in operations, software development, systems performance, and resilience engineering
• Working in highly regulated environments such as DoD, Medical & Financial sectors
• Scripting/coding from scratch (not just editing / adding on to existing scripts/code/templates) in common programming language(s) (python, golang, etc.)
• Building, analyzing, deploying and troubleshooting scalable distributed systems and software on premise, on cloud and in air gapped environments
• Installing, configuring, and troubleshooting UNIX /Linux based environments, virtualization and containerization (orchestration, runtime security, continuous monitoring, etc.)
• Monitoring and testing applications performance for potential bottlenecks, identify possible solutions, and work with developers to implement those fixes
• Authoring / maintaining security, backup, and redundancy strategies
• Writing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and software to increase system efficiency and lower the human intervention time on any tasks
• Partnering with engineering teams in the design of systems and infrastructure

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy:

• Health:
  • Medical/Dental/Vision
    • Premiums are 100% Company Paid
    • Health Reimbursement Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• Financial:
  • Annual Salary Range: $185,000 to $215,000
  • 401k with Employer Contribution (Regardless of Employee Contribution)
  • Company Stock Options
  • Home Office Setup Budget
• Leave:
  • Unlimited paid time off, with a mandatory 10 days off on top of 11 federal government holidays, week of Thanksgiving, last two weeks of December (including New Year's Day) 
  • Paid Parental Leave
• Learning:
  • Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
  • Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.