About the Role

As federal agencies modernize toward containerized, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes has become the backbone for how mission applications are deployed, scaled, and secured. As a Mid-Level Kubernetes Engineer at AFS, you will design and operate container orchestration platforms that support production workloads for defense, civilian, and public health clients — frequently within on-prem, air-gapped, or hardened cloud environments subject to strict federal security requirements (e.g., DoD hardening guides, STIGs).

You'll be responsible for the reliability, security, and performance of the platform's application teams build on top of, and for helping those teams adopt Kubernetes patterns correctly.

What You Will Do

• Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, or on-prem/bare-metal) supporting federal client production workloads

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for containerized application deployment, including GitOps workflows

• Harden clusters to meet federal security requirements, including DISA STIGs, Pod Security Standards, network policies, and RBAC configuration

• Implement and manage service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), ingress controllers, and secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets, or cloud-native equivalents)

• Build observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry) to monitor cluster and application health

• Automate infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) for repeatable, auditable deployments

• Troubleshoot cluster and application incidents, from networking and scheduling issues to resource contention and failed deployments

• Partner with application development teams to containerize services, define resource requests/limits, and adopt Kubernetes-native patterns (health checks, autoscaling, rolling deployments)

• Support ATO and continuous monitoring processes, including vulnerability scanning and remediation for container images and cluster configurations

• Document platform architecture, operational runbooks, and onboarding guides for application teams

What You Bring

Platform Mindset: You think about the system that other engineers build on, not just the feature in front of you. You design for reliability and repeatability, and you assume your work will run unattended at 2am and needs to be debuggable then.

Security as a Default, Not an Afterthought: You bring hardening, least-privilege access, and compliance requirements into the design from day one, especially in DoD/federal contexts where the bar is higher and the environments are less forgiving.

Calm, Methodical Incident Response: When a cluster or workload misbehaves, you isolate the problem systematically — logs, events, metrics, network paths — rather than guessing, and you communicate clearly with stakeholders while you work it.

Enablement Over Gatekeeping: You'd rather teach an application team to deploy safely on the platform than be the bottleneck for every release. You build guardrails and self-service tooling, not just tickets.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience

• 4 years of experience operating Kubernetes in production, including cluster administration, workload scheduling, and troubleshooting

• Strong Linux systems fundamentals and scripting ability (Bash, Python, or Go)

• Hands-on experience with Helm, Kustomize, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)

• Solid understanding of container networking, RBAC, and Kubernetes security primitives (Pod Security Standards, network policies, secrets management)

• Must be a U.S. Citizen

PreferredQualifications

• Experience operating Kubernetes within DoD, IC, or other federal environments subject to STIGs, ATO, or Assured Workloads requirements

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)

• Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)

• Familiarity with a major cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering (EKS, GKE, AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift

• Experience supporting air-gapped or disconnected/limited-connectivity Kubernetes deployments

• Experience with Kubernetes-based AI/ML workload orchestration (Kubeflow, KServe, GPU scheduling)

• Contributions to open-source Kubernetes/CNCF projects

Clearance

• An active TS/SCI clearance is required