DevOps Engineer

 Job Overview:

We’re looking for an infrastructure engineer who builds and ships. This is not a role for someone who hands off design documents or lives only in architecture diagrams. You’ll be writing Terraform, supporting production infrastructure, troubleshooting real issues, optimizing underperforming systems, and automating work so teams can move faster.

What makes this role different is how we work. AI is part of your daily toolkit. We’re not looking for someone who is merely “interested in” AI tools—you already know how to use them to accelerate real work. You understand how tools like Claude Code can dramatically reduce the time it takes to build infrastructure, write scripts, or troubleshoot problems, and you’re motivated to apply that speed in a production environment.

This is a hands-on engineering role. Expect to spend the majority of your time building and improving infrastructure, sometime designing and refining solutions with more senior engineers, and minimal time in meetings. If your goal is to move away from hands‑on engineering or into a role focused primarily on diagramming and presentations, this likely isn’t the right fit.

Responsibilities: Your day if you join us:

What You'll Build

Embedded product support

• Act as the dedicated DevOps engineer for your assigned product team, taking part in their planning, stand-ups and release cycles
• Own the product's infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and environments (dev, QA, staging, prod) from start to finish
• Be the first escalation point for the product's production issues, deployments and environment requests
• Bring central DevOps standards (Terraform modules, pipeline templates, security and compliance controls) into the product team, and feed the product team's needs back to DevOps 

• Terraform modules for Azure Government and Commercial deployments—networking, compute, storage, identity, databases, monitoring
• AI-assisted Terraform module generation with automated testing, documentation, and compliance validation
• State management patterns for multi-environment deployments (dev/QA/staging/prod) with proper isolation
• Drift detection and remediation automation—catch what changed and fix it before it becomes an incident

CI/CD with GitHub Actions

• GitHub Actions workflows for infrastructure and application delivery: plan/apply gates, environment approvals and reusable workflows
• OIDC federation from GitHub to Azure, so pipelines don't need stored secrets
• Branch protection and rulesets, with automated policy and security checks in the pipeline

Azure Networking & Hybrid Connectivity

• Hub-and-spoke architectures with proper segmentation for FedRAMP boundaries
• Private Link configurations, DNS forwarding, and service endpoint strategies
• ExpressRoute and VPN connectivity for hybrid scenarios
• Azure Firewall and NSG policies with AI-assisted rule generation and audit

Identity and security

• Azure RBAC, managed identities and PIM, with least-privilege access
• Key Vault access models (RBAC and access policies) and secret rotation
• Conditional Access and identity governance across multiple tenants

• PowerShell modules for Azure resource management, database operations, reporting, and remediation
• Bash scripts for Linux workloads and CI/CD pipeline integration
• Python utilities for API integrations, data processing, and custom tooling
• AI-assisted script generation with proper error handling, logging, and testing

Database support

• Azure SQL and SQL Server operations: backups, maintenance automation and first-line performance troubleshooting
• Zero- or minimal-downtime database migrations with automated rollback

Operational Excellence

• Azure Monitor, Log Analytics (KQL) and Application Insights
• Runbooks and automation for common fixes
• Cost optimization: reserved instances, right-sizing and cleaning up orphaned resources
• Taking part in the on-call rotation

Qualifications: You are a great fit for this role if you:

Required:

•  6+ years of hands-on Azure infrastructure experience (Azure Government strongly preferred)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Strong Terraform: modules, workspaces, remote state, provider configuration, testing (Terratest or similar)
• Strong GitHub Actions: workflow authoring, reusable workflows, environments and approvals, OIDC to Azure, secrets management
• Strong PowerShell (Azure modules, REST API calls, error handling, module development), plus working Python
• In-depth Azure networking: VNets, peering, Private Link, DNS, NSGs, Azure Firewall, ExpressRoute
• Azure identity: RBAC, managed identities, PIM and Key Vault access models
• Observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics / KQL, Application Insights
• Working knowledge of SQL Server / Azure SQL: backups, performance triage and migrations
• Experience working directly with development teams in an embedded or product-aligned DevOps role
• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor)
• Git workflows: branching strategies, PR reviews, resolving merge conflicts
• Experience with FedRAMP, CMMC or similar compliance frameworks
• Comfortable debugging production issues under pressure, and taking part in an on-call rotation
• Due to customer requirements, U.S. Citizenship is required.  Ability to gain and maintain Trusted Role is required. 

Location: Herndon, VA- Hybrid, Cincinnati, OH (3x/week)

Preferred Qualifications:

You are exactly who we are looking for if you:

• Advanced SQL Server tuning: execution plans, index strategies, stored procedure optimization, Query Store
• Schema version control (Flyway, Liquibase or similar)
•  Bicep in addition to Terraform
• Container platforms: AKS, Container Apps, Docker
• Azure Service Bus operations and troubleshooting
• Background in defense, aerospace or other highly regulated industries

You've already changed how you work because of AI tools. You don't just use autocomplete—you've figured out how to prompt for entire infrastructure patterns, optimize complex SQL queries, and iterate faster than you ever could manually. You have opinions about which AI tools work best for different tasks.

You prefer automation over manual effort. When you see a team doing something repetitive, your instinct is to automate it. When you see documentation that's out of date, you think about how to generate it from the source of truth.

You can context-switch. Monday might be debugging a DNS forwarding issue. Tuesday might be optimizing a slow stored procedure. Wednesday might be writing a Terraform module for a new service. Thursday might be helping a developer understand why their app can't reach a database. You're comfortable across the stack.

The pay range for this position is $100,000k - 130,000k/yr; however, the final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, skills, qualifications, and location. Exostar also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, EAP, Flexible Spending Accounts, 401(k) matching, flexible time off and sick leave

We build trust infrastructure for defense contractors. FedRAMP Moderate certified, CMMC compliant, serving aerospace and defense supply chains. The work matters—our platforms enable secure collaboration across thousands of organizations in the defense industrial base.

The environment: Azure Government and Commercial, complex networking with hybrid connectivity, SQL Server databases that need to perform under load, real compliance requirements (not checkbox security), and a team that's actively adopting AI tools for development. We're rolling out Claude Code to 100+ developers. We're building with AI, not just talking about it.

The challenges are real: Service Bus queues that need to handle thousands of messages without crashing, DNS forwarding that has to work across multiple tenants, database queries that auditors will scrutinize, stored procedures that need to run in milliseconds not seconds. If you want interesting problems, we have them.

We believe in employee development: we promote internally and provide training and educational assistance

We provide a fun, engaged workplace, with social and community-building events

We offer comprehensive benefits and flexible time off plans

Exostar is an Equal Employment Employer.  The company provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, disability status or genetic information.  Exostar is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all persons in all facets of employment including recruiting, hiring, compensation, promotion, training, benefits, transfers and working conditions.