Job Purpose/Summary
The Field Application Engineer will serve as the primary technical bridge between our engineering team and customer environments where our product is deployed, including secure facilities. They will support customer operators to manage the day-to-day health, reliability, and stability of production edge deployments, ensuring that our software performs predictably across upgrades and that site administrators have the tools, automation, and documentation needed to operate the system with confidence. They will also be a key feedback channel into our software engineering team, driving continuous improvement of the deployment, configuration, and system administration experience of our product.
This is a hands-on, customer-facing engineering role. Success in year one involves establishing repeatable deployment QA and validation procedures, hardening our systems against DoD/DoW security and compliance requirements, and building the automation needed to scale operations across multiple customer sites. Within 6-12 months, they will be a trusted onsite technical authority for our collaborators and customers and will play a critical role in shaping how our product is delivered, maintained, and evolved in operational environments.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Be a primary day-to-day onsite support engineer for production customer edge deployments (both in and out of the SCIF)
- Work with our software engineering team to continuously improve the system administration and software deployment experience of our product
- Design and conduct software deployment QA and validation procedures to ensure site reliability and stability between software upgrades
- Interface and engage with technical and non-technical external stakeholders in potentially access-limited environments - this will include the customer and system administrators from our collaborators
Qualifications
- Linux system administration experience (familiarity with RHEL administration preferred)
- Experience with and understanding of the Defense Information Security Agency Security Technical Implementation Guides and experience following DoW security/compliance regimes
- Experience developing and using automation tools with Ansible, Python, Bash, etc...
- Experience collaborating with technical and non-technical external stakeholders
- Experienced reading and analyzing system and application logs
- Familiarity with cloud-native deployment automation (ex. Terraform)
- Familiarity with Kubernetes (experience monitoring and troubleshooting clusters + cluster lifecycle management is a plus)
- Eligible to obtain a U.S. Security Clearance - U.S. Citizenship required.
Working conditions
- Employees may be called upon to participate in in-person meetings, training, or company functions at Knowmadics offices or other designated locations. Travel in support of business operations may also be required, and employees are expected to comply with these obligations as part of their position.
- Candidate should live within driving distance of the following areas: Waldorf, MD
- Estimated Travel: 25-50% (local)
Physical requirements
May include sitting or standing for extended periods, working with computers and technical equipment, and occasionally lifting or moving materials or tools
Direct reports
None
