Principal Software Engineer - Deployment Environments Domain Lead

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company is a dynamic non-traditional defense contractor that delivers advanced technologies in support of U.S. National Security and Defense. For the past forty-five plus years, we have supported Department of Defense customers by developing innovative remote sensing algorithms, tools, and techniques to deliver world-class data exploitation capabilities supporting missile defense; intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance; space domain awareness; and aircraft survivability missions. Important Notice: SciTec exclusively works on U.S. government contracts that require U.S. citizenship for all employees. Applicants that do not meet this requirement will not be considered. We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as our Deployment Environments Domain Lead. In this role, you will establish repeatable, secure, observable, and reliable practices for building, packaging, deploying, and operating the software that supports our mission critical data processing, visualization, and operational workflows. This role is hands on and combines deep technical work with technical stewardship: you will assess how our teams build and deploy software today, establish evidence-based recommendations, build reference implementations, and work directly with engineers to raise our organization-wide capability. The ideal candidate has deep, production-grade expertise in CI/CD, containerization, and Kubernetes, the ability to evaluate deployment approaches against real workload requirements, and the communication and mentoring skills to turn that expertise into practical guidance that other engineers can adopt independently. Responsibilities Assess current build, packaging, and deployment practices, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams. Define evaluation criteria to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended deployment technologies, patterns, and practices. Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and troubleshooting guides. Build and maintain validated reference pipelines, Helm charts, container images, and starter templates for common deployment use cases. Guide CI/CD pipeline design, automation, artifact management, and reproducible builds. Establish practices for container image construction, dependency management, image optimization, and image security. Guide Kubernetes architecture, scheduling, resource management, and workload orchestration. Establish practices for Helm and other deployment packaging, configuration management, and secrets handling. Improve local and development environments, environment provisioning, and integration testing workflows. Guide deployment strategies, rollback, release promotion, and compatibility management. Establish practices for health checks, observability, resource limits, scaling, resilience, disaster recovery, and software supply-chain security. Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices. Collaborate with Data Storage and Workload Communications domain leads on cross-domain problems such as memory pressure, pod restarts, connection saturation, and end-to-end throughput and latency. Coordinate with enterprise infrastructure and platform teams on ownership boundaries for cluster operations, cloud accounts, networking, and infrastructure provisioning. Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change. Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership. Perform other duties as assigned. Requirements Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field. 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with build and deployment infrastructure. Deep experience with containerization (Docker and/or Podman), including image construction, optimization, and security. Deep production experience with Kubernetes, including resource management, scheduling, and troubleshooting. Experience packaging and deploying workloads with Helm or similar tools. Experience designing and maintaining production CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins). Experience with local Kubernetes environments (e.g., Minikube, KinD) for development and integration testing. Experience with observability, logging, and monitoring for containerized workloads. Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical alternatives, validate them through prototypes or pilots, and clearly articulate their tradeoffs. Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language such as Python, Go, Bash, or TypeScript/Node…