Position Description & Qualifications

Serco is excited to support theAir Force Modeling and Simulation Support Services(AFMS3) contract. The primary purpose of this contract is to ensure that the Department of the Air Force (DAF), Department of Defense (DoD), and External Partner Agencies maintain cutting-edge Modeling and Simulation (M&S) capabilities that are secure, interoperable, and efficient. The contractor will provide comprehensive support and innovative solutions that enable the continuous evolution and enhancement of M&S systems, ensuring that the DAF and DoD can effectively prepare for and execute their missions with the highest level of readiness and lethality.

Must have an active Department of War (DoW) Secret security clearance.

We are seeking an experienced LeadDevOps Engineer to drive infrastructure automation, containerized deployments, and CI/CD maturity across our engineering organization, while serving as a technical mentor and force multiplier for the broader team. This role owns the design and evolution of our Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), container orchestration (AWS ECS), and Docker-based build/deploy pipelines, and is expected to actively grow the skills of other engineers through pairing, code review, and structured mentorship - not just ship infrastructure solo. The ideal candidate is as strong a coach and communicator as they are a hands-on engineer.

In this role, you will:

Mentorship & Team Leadership

• Serve as the technical mentor for DevOps and platform engineers, actively growing their skills in Terraform, containerization, and CI/CD practices through pairing, code review, and structured 1:1 guidance.
• Establish and lead internal knowledge-sharing practices (brown bags, runbooks, documentation standards, onboarding guides) to raise the team's overall DevOps maturity.
• Set technical standards and best practices for infrastructure code, container builds, and pipeline design, and hold the team accountable to them through review and coaching rather than top-down mandate.

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

• Design, build, and maintain modular, reusable Terraform code for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure across environments (dev, staging, production).
• Establish Terraform state management, workspace, and module versioning strategy to support multiple teams and environments safely.

Container Orchestration (AWS ECS & Docker)

• Architect and operate containerized workloads on AWS ECS (Fargate and/or EC2 launch types), including service definitions, task scaling, networking, and load balancing.
• Own Docker image build standards, including multi-stage builds, image hardening/security scanning, and registry management (ECR).
• Optimize ECS cluster performance, cost, and reliability, including auto-scaling policies, capacity planning, and blue/green or rolling deployment strategies.

CI/CD Pipeline Engineering

• Design, build, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines that automate build, test, security scanning, and deployment of containerized applications to ECS.
• Implement deployment safety mechanisms: automated testing gates, canary/blue-green deployments, rollback automation, and release approvals.

General Engineering & Compliance

• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure infrastructure and pipelines meet applicable security baselines and, where required, support Assessment & Authorization (A&A)/RMF documentation for infrastructure components.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response for infrastructure and deployment-related issues; drive blameless postmortems and follow-through on action items.

To be successful in this role, you will have:

• An active DoW Secret clearance required at time of hire.
• The possibility to telecommute (Full-time)
• A Bachelor's degree (or additional years of relevant experience in technical, engineering, cybersecurity, or program management fields in lieu of degree)
• Prior experience supporting AFMS, or other DoD M&S programs is strongly desired
• 8 years of DevOps/infrastructure/platform engineering experience, including prior experience mentoring or leading other engineers.
• A deep, hands-on production experience with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code across multi-environment AWS deployments.
• Hands-on production experience with AWS ECS (Fargate and/or EC2), including service/task design, scaling, and networking.
• A strong hands-on experience with Docker, including image build optimization, security hardening, and registry management.
• The proven experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CodePipeline, or similar) for containerized applications.
• To demonstrate ability to mentor engineers effectively - through code review, pairing, documentation, and coaching - with examples of having grown others' skills.
• A strong working knowledge of AWS core services (VPC, IAM, ALB/NLB, CloudWatch, ECR, Route 53).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, comfortable presenting technical decisions to both engineers and leadership.
• A CompTIA Security +.
• The ability to travel 10%.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with policy-as-code tools (Sentinel, OPA/Conftest) and Terraform automation platforms (Terraform Cloud/Enterprise).
• Experience with container security scanning tools (Trivy, Snyk, Aqua) integrated into CI/CD.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch) for infrastructure and pipeline monitoring.
• Relevant certifications (AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, AWS Solutions Architect, HashiCorp Terraform Associate).
• Experience formally leading a team or acting as a technical lead across multiple projects/repos.

If you are interested in supporting and working with our team across the globe on a passionate, talented, and diverseSercoteam- then submit your application now for immediate consideration. It only takes a few minutes and could change your career!