Staff DevOps Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Ontic provides software that helps corporate and government security teams identify threats, assess risk, and respond faster to keep people and organizations safe. Its AI-powered Connected Intelligence Platform unifies security operations and data into a centralized system of record, enabling organizations to conduct risk assessments, protect against workplace violence, and manage threats and incidents more efficiently. Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies rely on Ontic to support security programs such as executive protection, threat intelligence, and corporate investigations. Learn more at ontic.ai or follow us on LinkedIn.

🏢 About Ontic

We’re seeking a DevOps Engineering leader to architect and operate secure, scalable Kubernetes platforms across AWS and AWS GovCloud, including FedRAMP-authorized environments. This person will drive zero-trust security, Terraform and GitOps automation, observability, reliability, disaster recovery, and cost governance for both multi-tenant and dedicated enterprise deployments. They’ll also provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and partner closely with Security and Engineering to evolve Ontic’s platform strategy.

🎯 The Role

This role is based in Austin, Texas, and requires work from the Austin office three days a week. This role supports a FedRAMP environment.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and governance of scalable, resilient, Kubernetes platforms across approved cloud environments and FedRAMP authorization boundaries
• Define standardized blueprints for multi-tenant and dedicated enterprise deployments
• Architect high-availability, multi-AZ, and disaster recovery strategies aligned with RTO/RPO objectives
• System inventory, authorized-boundary ownership, significant-change assessment, and approved-cloud-boundary wording.
• Establish secure-by-design cloud architecture and workload identity models
• Enforce RBAC, IAM governance, encryption standards, and least-privilege principles
• Integrate supply-chain security, policy enforcement, and compliance validation into CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensure infrastructure meets applicable FedRAMP and enterprise security-control requirements.
• Vulnerability remediation, POA&M/exception tracking, and incident-response exercises.
• Implement AIOps capabilities for intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, and controlled remediation through approved runbooks, policy gates, and auditable change controls.
• Enhance observability maturity using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing
• Support AI/ML workload infrastructure, including scalable compute and secure model deployment
• Leverage automation and analytics to reduce MTTR and operational toil
• Drive infrastructure standardization using Terraform, Helm, and GitOps workflows
• Design safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, progressive delivery)
• Improve infrastructure drift detection and environment reproducibility
• Define SLO/SLI frameworks and reliability benchmarks
• Optimize autoscaling (HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler) and workload efficiency
• Improve performance and scalability of distributed stateful systems
• Backup restoration and recurring disaster-recovery testing against RTO/RPO.
• Implement cloud cost observability and allocation strategies
• Optimize compute, storage, and networking costs across multi-cloud environments
• Establish cost governance models aligned with business growth
• Mentor senior engineers and promote DevOps culture across teams
• Drive architecture reviews and production readiness assessments
• Partner with security and engineering to align platform strategy with enterprise objectives

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of experience in DevOps / Platform Engineering in enterprise or high-scale SaaS environments.
• Proven experience in architecting and operating production environments in AWS and AWS GovCloud; GCP or OCI experience is a plus.
• Demonstrated experience maintaining a FedRAMP Moderate/High production environment, including continuous monitoring, vulnerability remediation, incident response, configuration management, and audit evidence.
• Experience owning infrastructure patterns and changes within the authorized boundary, including system inventory, data-flow implications, inherited controls, and third-party services.
• Strong experience designing and operating AWS Landing Zone architectures, including multi-account governance and guardrails.
• Advanced Terraform experience building reusable, secure infrastructure modules and standardized environments.
• Deep understanding of AWS and AWS GovCloud networking, including VPC design, segmentation, routing, private connectivity, and security controls.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes-based platform design and large-scale cluster operations.
• Strong experience implementing GitOps workflows (ArgoCD) and CI/CD automation (Jenkins, GitLab).
• Hands-on production experience with distributed systems, including MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Redis, and ArangoDB.
• Strong understanding of IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, and zero-trust access models.
• Experience implementing enterprise observability stacks.
• Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS platforms and dedicated workload environments.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Exposure to service mesh and secure east-west traffic management.
• Exposure to AIOps is a plus

🎁 Benefits

Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry, and are one part of the total compensation package that also includes a bonus plan, equity, benefits, and other opportunities at Ontic. Individual pay decisions are based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, and skillset.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is based in Austin, Texas, and requires work from the Austin office three days a week.