Staff DevOps Engineer, Federal/National Security

We are looking for a hands-on DevOps Engineer to build the secure delivery and deployment foundation for Red Cell Federal.

You will start with a largely blank slate. Your initial focus will be designing and implementing CI/CD, software promotion, infrastructure automation, and operational processes for software deployed across unclassified, controlled, and classified environments. You will also contribute to the technical work required to pursue and maintain federal authorization requirements.

As customer deployments grow, you will become a critical connection point between our software teams and restricted customer environments. In situations where other engineers cannot access the environment or receive its logs, you will diagnose issues, coordinate fixes, and safely deploy corrected artifacts.

This role is well suited to someone who has built DevOps systems before, has strong technical judgment, and wants genuine ownership rather than a mature platform to maintain.

• Design and build Red Cell Federal’s CI/CD and software promotion pipelines from the ground up.
• Establish secure processes for promoting software across unclassified, controlled, and classified environments.
• Support ATO-related technical activities for software agents and customer deployments.
• Build repeatable deployment, release, rollback, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities.
• Deploy and operate software in government and customer-controlled environments.
• Diagnose issues in environments where logs, data, or direct access cannot be shared broadly.
• Partner with software and platform engineering teams to isolate problems and deliver corrected artifacts.
• Define infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, secrets management, and artifact-handling practices.
• Help establish operational and compliance practices appropriate for federal work.
• Evaluate tools and architecture based on security, reliability, portability, and mission requirements.
• Document systems and processes so deployments can scale across customers and environments.
• Serve as a hands-on technical owner while the federal engineering organization grows.

• Active U.S. government Secret clearance or higher. An active Top Secret clearance is preferred.
• Professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, release engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Experience building or substantially redesigning CI/CD and deployment systems.
• Experience deploying software into government, defense, regulated, disconnected, air-gapped, or otherwise restricted environments.
• Strong understanding of software delivery, artifact promotion, environment isolation, access controls, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience with GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, or comparable tooling.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, Helm, or related orchestration and packaging technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and configuration automation.
• Ability to script and automate in languages such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Ability to make sound technical decisions with incomplete requirements.
• Strong communication skills across software engineering, security, compliance, and customer stakeholders.
• A builder mentality and genuine interest in creating systems from zero.

• Experience with IL4, IL5, IL6, classified, or cross-domain deployment workflows.
• Experience contributing to an ATO or continuous authorization process.
• Familiarity with NIST, RMF, FedRAMP, CMMC, STIGs, or related federal requirements.

Why Join?

• Build the federal deployment platform from its earliest stage.
• Own foundational technical decisions with meaningful autonomy.
• Work alongside strong engineers, experienced advisors, and a growing federal go-to-market organization.
• Solve difficult deployment and infrastructure problems that do not exist in ordinary commercial environments.
• Join a high-ownership team that intends to move quickly and operate outside established playbooks.

Salary Range: $170,000-240,000 + bonus + equity. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation):

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:

• Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;
• Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
• Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact talent@redcellpartners.com.

Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.