Senior / Staff Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Career Mentors, LLC • New York, NY

2d • $190,000 - $220,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Own self-hosted deployments for sensitive federal and defense customers. This high-ownership infrastructure role begins hands-on — managing deployments across cloud to fully air-gapped on-prem environments, providing compliance guidance, and performing deep debugging — and evolves into building automation, tools, and broader platform-level infrastructure to support efficient scaling for enterprise clients.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in infrastructure software engineering.
• Demonstrated ownership of production Kubernetes clusters (through professional work, research, or substantial personal projects).
• On-call experience debugging complex production system failures.
• Startup background preferred (ideally Series B/C stage); previous forward-deployed engineer or government-sector experience is a strong plus.
• Proficiency with IaC tools (Pulumi and/or Terraform).
• Broad practical understanding of networking, operating systems, and cybersecurity.
• Experience supporting regulated environments such as FedRAMP, CMMC, NIST SP 800-53, IL-5/6, or FedRAMP Moderate.
• Comfort navigating unfamiliar codebases.
• Strong communication skills for customer-facing interactions and internal collaboration.
• Automation-first mindset (builder who codes solutions rather than pure operations).
• Must be a US Person per ITAR. TS/SCI clearance is a significant advantage.

Responsibilities

• Adapt, own, and maintain infrastructure for large customers in federal/defense spaces across heterogeneous environments.
• Harden and continuously evaluate security configurations in self-hosted setups.
• Guide customers in establishing and implementing compliant architectures, navigating strict security and operational requirements (FedRAMP Moderate equivalent, CMMC, NIST SP 800-53, IL-5/6).
• Contribute directly to the product codebase to improve deployability, security, observability, and reliability.
• Serve as a forward-deployed engineer, including potential on-site support for classified deployments.
• Debug complex technical issues in novel or limited-access environments and enhance observability for future efficiency.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to handle software updates, migrations, network changes, and production incidents.
• Develop automation, playbooks, and tools to transition from manual operations to scalable multi-customer support.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed