Senior/Lead DevOps Engineer – Federal (AI)

Location: Tysons, Virginia, United States; travel to customer sites up to 50%, primarily in the DC area.

Salary: $159,000–$230,000 USD annual base pay.

Company

C3 AI develops enterprise AI software, including the C3 Agentic AI Platform, industry-specific SaaS applications, and generative AI products.

What you will do

• Lead federal customer deployments of the C3 AI Platform from requirements and architecture through installation, validation, and operational handoff.
• Design customized installations for on-premises, disconnected, and air-gapped federal environments with specialized access and security requirements.
• Deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters with infrastructure as code and containerized applications with Helm.
• Build scripting, automation, CI/CD pipelines, artifact repositories, monitoring, and alerting to streamline deployments and system operations.
• Resolve complex service problems, automate prevention of recurrence, and deliver root cause analyses and postmortems.
• Serve as the technical customer contact by briefing status, documenting architectures, writing runbooks, and collaborating with Services, Engineering, and Platform Operations.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM or a comparable field.
• US citizenship and an active Secret clearance or higher are required; TS/SCI or higher and CI or Full-Scope polygraph are preferred.
• 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience deploying, managing, and operating scalable, fault-tolerant Kubernetes infrastructure in AWS and Azure; on-premises experience is preferred.
• Hands-on administration of one or more Kubernetes distributions, including AKS, EKS, GKE, RKE2, K3s, or OpenShift.
• Experience deploying Kubernetes with infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform, and packaging containerized applications with Helm.
• Configuration management and automation experience with Ansible; Puppet is a plus.
• Experience with CI/CD and artifact tools such as GitLab CI, Argo CD, Nexus, or Artifactory.
• Expertise in Linux, networking, database concepts, cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP, government cloud regions, and Python or Bash automation.
• Excellent problem-solving, critical-thinking, communication, customer-facing, and independent technical leadership skills.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future company sponsorship.

Nice to have

• Experience with disconnected or air-gapped environments, DISA STIG hardening, and RMF/ATO support.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification.
• Experience administering Kubernetes-based microservices and databases such as Postgres and Cassandra.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive compensation package, generous equity plan, and employee benefits.
• Customer-facing work with federal engineering teams and cross-functional collaboration across Services, Engineering, and Platform Operations.
• Regular customer-site travel of up to 50%, primarily in the DC area.