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Defense Unicorns, a U.S. government contractor, is seeking a Platform Engineer to join the Navy Delivery team. This role bridges platform engineering, application development, DevOps, and application security, working with the Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS) and Kubernetes-based environments.
You will serve as a critical link between application teams (custom development, COTS, and open-source software) and the Navy platform environment. The ideal candidate understands both the application and platform boundary, comfortable with application source code, APIs, containers, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes resources, Helm charts, and production runtime concerns.
Key responsibilities include:
- Collaborating directly with application teams to understand their software architecture and translate needs into repeatable deployment artifacts and processes
- Identifying and resolving issues across application and platform layers
- Evaluating and implementing innovative solutions to complex technical problems spanning 2-3 knowledge domains
- Demonstrating expert knowledge in 1-2 key technologies such as full-stack development, CI/CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, Terraform/Tofu, AWS, or Go
- Implementing infrastructure as code and building/maintaining Kubernetes clusters on various distributions (EKS, RKE2)
- Applying extensive experience with cloud-native technology deployments, emphasizing secure coding and vulnerability remediation
- Building relationships with external teams and collaborating across platform teams
- Contributing to strategic planning aligned with mission objectives
Current application teams use React, Vue, NGINX, C#/.NET, and Python/FastAPI. Direct experience with every technology is not required; the role values engineers who quickly understand unfamiliar architectures.
Travel expectations: 4-12 times per year.
Required qualifications:
- Professional experience developing, deploying, supporting, or operating production applications or platform environments
- Hands-on experience with cloud-native technologies, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, or Kubernetes
- Strong Linux/Unix skills and cross-layer troubleshooting ability
- Experience with application architectures, source code, APIs, containers, and deployment requirements
- YAML-based configuration experience (Kubernetes manifests, Helm, CRDs, CI/CD pipelines)
- Familiarity with application security, API security, container security, cloud infrastructure security, and vulnerability remediation
- Strong problem-solving and independent work capability
- Ability to collaborate effectively across teams
- Eligible to apply for and maintain a U.S. government security clearance
- Ability to obtain DoD 8570 IAT II certification
