Kubernetes Engineer

📋 Job Overview

At Accenture Federal Services, nothing matters more than helping the US federal government make the nation stronger and safer and life better for people. Our 13,000+ people are united in a shared purpose to pursue the limitless potential of technology and ingenuity for clients across defense, national security, public safety, civilian, and military health organizations. Join Accenture Federal Services, a technology company within global Accenture. Recognized as a Glassdoor Top 100 Best Place to Work, we offer a collaborative and caring community where you feel like you belong and are empowered to grow, learn and thrive through hands-on experience, certifications, industry training and more. Join us to drive positive, lasting change that moves missions and the government forward!

🏢 About Accenture Federal Services

Accenture Federal Services is a technology company within global Accenture, recognized as a Glassdoor Top 100 Best Place to Work. We offer a collaborative and caring community where you feel like you belong and are empowered to grow, learn and thrive through hands-on experience, certifications, industry training and more.

🎯 The Role

As federal agencies modernize toward containerized, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes has become the backbone for how mission applications are deployed, scaled, and secured. As a Mid-Level Kubernetes Engineer at AFS, you will design and operate container orchestration platforms that support production workloads for defense, civilian, and public health clients — frequently within on-prem, air-gapped, or hardened cloud environments subject to strict federal security requirements (e.g., DoD hardening guides, STIGs).

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, or on-prem/bare-metal) supporting federal client production workloads
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for containerized application deployment, including GitOps workflows
• Harden clusters to meet federal security requirements, including DISA STIGs, Pod Security Standards, network policies, and RBAC configuration
• Implement and manage service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), ingress controllers, and secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets, or cloud-native equivalents)
• Build observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry) to monitor cluster and application health
• Automate infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) for repeatable, auditable deployments
• Troubleshoot cluster and application incidents, from networking and scheduling issues to resource contention and failed deployments
• Partner with application development teams to containerize services, define resource requests/limits, and adopt Kubernetes-native patterns (health checks, autoscaling, rolling deployments)
• Support ATO and continuous monitoring processes, including vulnerability scanning and remediation for container images and cluster configurations
• Document platform architecture, operational runbooks, and onboarding guides for application teams

📌 Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience
• 4 years of experience operating Kubernetes in production, including cluster administration, workload scheduling, and troubleshooting
• Strong Linux systems fundamentals and scripting ability (Bash, Python, or Go)
• Hands-on experience with Helm, Kustomize, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)
• Solid understanding of container networking, RBAC, and Kubernetes security primitives (Pod Security Standards, network policies, secrets management)
• Must be a U.S. Citizen

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience operating Kubernetes within DoD, IC, or other federal environments subject to STIGs, ATO, or Assured Workloads requirements
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
• Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
• Familiarity with a major cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering (EKS, GKE, AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift
• Experience supporting air-gapped or disconnected/limited-connectivity Kubernetes deployments
• Experience with Kubernetes-based AI/ML workload orchestration (Kubeflow, KServe, GPU scheduling)
• Contributions to open-source Kubernetes/CNCF projects

🎁 Benefits

Accenture Federal Services offers a wide variety of benefits. The base pay range for this position in the specified locations is $100,200 — $180,100 USD. You can find more information on benefits here.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

• An active TS/SCI clearance is required