Title: DevSecOps Engineer (Mid-Level)

Location: Remote

Clearance Level: Active Secret clearance or ability to obtain

U.S. Citizenship: Required 

Summary:

ALEX – Alternative Experts is seeking a Mid-Level DevSecOps Engineer to support the design, deployment, and security of modern, cloud-based systems in a mission-driven environment. This role supports a distributed data ingestion and analysis platform that processes high volumes of unstructured data into structured, searchable knowledge.

The ideal candidate brings hands-on experience working within established CI/CD and containerized environments, contributing to automation, security integration, and platform reliability while collaborating with engineers and security partners to deliver scalable, secure, and compliant solutions.

Technical Environment and Platform Overview

The DevSecOps Engineer supports a distributed data ingestion and analysis platform designed to process large volumes of unstructured documents into structured, searchable knowledge.

The technical environment includes:

• CI/CD Pipelines: GitLab CI/CD and Jenkins (with an active migration to GitLab)
• Microservices Architecture: Containerized services using Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm
• Task Processing: Distributed worker frameworks (e.g., Celery)
• Data Ingestion: OCR and document parsing pipelines
• Machine Learning / NLP Services: Pre-trained and fine-tuned models
• Cloud & Storage: AWS (S3, EC2) and PostgreSQL
• Search & Retrieval: Vector databases (e.g., Weaviate)

The platform is continuously evolving to improve scalability, observability, reliability, and security, including selective adoption of event-driven architectural patterns where appropriate.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and enhance CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI/CD and Jenkins 
• Integrate security scanning and vulnerability detection into CI/CD workflows 
• Write and maintain Helm charts supporting Kubernetes deployments 
• Improve deployment reliability and reduce manual processes, including database migrations and rollbacks 
• Ensure consistency across development, staging, and production environments 
• Support secrets management and secure configuration practices 
• Develop dashboards and monitoring solutions providing at-a-glance system health 
• Implement and improve end-to-end testing within CI/CD pipelines 
• Troubleshoot issues across application, infrastructure, and pipeline layers 
• Collaborate with engineering and security teams to meet compliance and mission requirements 
• Support system evolution toward event-driven architectures where appropriate

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with Celery or other distributed task queues 
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL performance and scaling considerations 
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Ansible) 
• Exposure to vector databases or semantic search technologies 
• Experience with ML/NLP pipelines or RAG architectures 
• Experience implementing observability solutions (metrics, logging, tracing) 
• Familiarity with security tooling (SAST, DAST, container scanning) 
• Experience working in regulated environments (DoD, FedRAMP) 
• Familiarity with artifact repositories such as Nexus or Artifactory 

• 3–6 years of experience in DevOps, DevSecOps, platform, or backend engineering 
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, or similar 
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm 
• Experience supporting distributed systems or data pipelines 
• Ability to troubleshoot across application, queue, and infrastructure layers 
• Proficiency in Python and Bash scripting 
• Understanding of system reliability, scaling, and failure modes

Education and Certifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Security, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience)
• Preferred Certifications: CompTIA Security+, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect – Associate, CKAD or CKS (exposure or working knowledge)

About Us. Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Marshall, VA, ALEX - Alternative Experts, LLC (ALEX) is an ISO 9001:2015-certified Woman Owned Small Business that's changing the way government does business by delivering a powerful, industry-leading array of core services to help its clients achieve mission-critical objectives. ALEX provides a variety of benefits designed to help meet the needs of our employees. See a summary of ALEX's Employee Benefits for more information. 

ALEX is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability. Applicants must be able to perform the essential functions of the job. 

In order to comply with the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, we reasonably believe the pay range for this position is between $120,000 - $125,000. Multiple factors are taken into account with any offer of employment by ALEX, including experience, education, and skills. 

Reasonable accommodations will be made to allow employees to meet the essential functions of the job unless those accommodations cause undue hardships to the employer. To request a reasonable accommodation, contact the Human Resources Department at hr@alexinc.com.