DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer - Rockville, MD or McLean, VA

Title: DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Rockville, MD or McLean, VA (Hybrid 3 days onsite with 2 days remote)
Duration: 6 Months with possible extension
Interview process: Prescreen, Phone, Onsite panel

W2 and C2C

Job Summary:
The DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for building and maintaining cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines for a modern, AI-enabled platform. This role focuses on environment provisioning, container orchestration, CI/CD automation, and scalable infrastructure to support microservices-based applications. The engineer applies strong judgment to evaluate and implement effective infrastructure solutions.

Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure & Cloud Architecture
Provision and manage cloud environments across development, staging, and production
Deploy and operate containerized services within a microservices architecture
Manage container orchestration, including blue-green and canary deployment strategies
Support infrastructure for platform dependencies such as search services, caching layers, and databases
Evaluate and implement infrastructure tooling and architectural approaches
Build and manage cloud infrastructure using services such as compute, container registries, identity/access management, networking, storage, and monitoring tools

DevOps & CI/CD
Design, maintain, and enhance CI/CD pipelines for building, testing, and deploying services across environments
Collaborate with engineering teams on container optimization, configuration, and environment management
Identify gaps across systems and implement solutions that improve scalability and team autonomy
Analyze infrastructure trends and recommend improvements based on best practices

Monitoring, Scaling & Reliability
Implement monitoring, alerting, and auto-scaling strategies for platform services and workloads
Ensure system reliability through capacity planning, performance testing, and incident response
Optimize infrastructure performance and cost efficiency

Quality & Testing
Develop and maintain automated infrastructure testing (smoke tests, health checks, deployment validation)
Conduct load testing and performance benchmarking
Enforce quality gates in CI/CD pipelines (testing, linting, security scanning)
Validate infrastructure-as-code changes through automation and peer review

Mentorship & Collaboration
Provide guidance on infrastructure best practices and deployment strategies
Partner with cross-functional teams to support platform stability and delivery goals
Contribute to process improvements and operational excellence initiatives

Security & Compliance
Ensure adherence to security policies and best practices
Implement secure development and infrastructure practices, particularly for sensitive data
Participate in threat modeling and security reviews for systems and APIs
Support compliance requirements in regulated or security-conscious environments