Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer, Federal

About Us

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.

About Trase

Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig, Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security. 

About the Role

As a Senior or Staff DevOps Engineer at Trase, you will build, deploy, and operate the infrastructure supporting Red Cell Federal and Red Cell Partners’ incubations and portfolio companies. You will join Trase's dedicated RCF/RCP support team, with a strong focus on federal, government, and national security programs.

Red Cell Partners is an investment and incubation firm that builds and supports technology companies, including Trase. Red Cell Federal is our federal-focused partner within that ecosystem. This role helps RCF and other RCP partner companies adopt and operate Trase OS in their own environments.

This is a hands-on engineering role spanning partner onboarding, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, secure releases, observability, and production support. You will work directly with partner engineers, Trase's dedicated software engineers and TPM, Platform Engineering, and GRC to turn requirements into validated deployments and dependable operations.

The level will reflect the candidate's experience and demonstrated scope. Senior engineers will independently deliver and support complex partner deployments. Staff engineers will also lead architecture across partner environments, establish reusable standards, and mentor engineers.

Why this Role is Needed

RCF and RCP companies need secure, repeatable deployments across commercial and government cloud, private networks, and on-premises infrastructure. Their requirements span installation, integrations, hardening, upgrades, incident response, and ongoing vulnerability remediation.

This role provides dedicated engineering ownership from environment readiness through sustained operations. You will make deployments easier to install, validate, upgrade, and support, while turning recurring partner needs into reusable capabilities with Trase's platform team.

What You'll Do

• Build and operate RCF/RCP partner environments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and customer-controlled or on-premises infrastructure, adapting to each program's access, networking, and security requirements.
• Package and validate Trase OS services and dependencies using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and approved registries. Maintain complete, versioned image inventories, release manifests, and image digests so partner deliveries contain the required artifacts.
• Create reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, cluster bootstrap automation, and CI/CD or GitOps workflows using Terraform, Pulumi, Argo CD, or comparable tools.
• Prepare and validate networking, IAM, secrets, certificates, storage, registries, and model-provider connectivity. Support restricted-network and disconnected deployment patterns where required, in partnership with application engineers.
• Remove or abstract cloud-specific dependencies that block partner deployments. Validate representative agent workflows end to end, including service integrations, authentication, model access, and persistent state.
• Own technical triage and troubleshooting for partner deployment and production issues across application services, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and networks. Coordinate fixes and escalations with named owners and verify resolution with partners.
• Deliver tested releases, patches, and upgrades with automated validation gates, version compatibility checks, smoke tests, rollback procedures, and clear release notes. Confirm the deployed artifacts match the approved release.
• Operate metrics, logs, traces, audit logging, dashboards, alerts, and SLOs for partner environments. Support incident response, recovery, capacity planning, and reliability improvements.
• Partner with GRC and RCF security teams on container hardening, vulnerability scanning, CVE remediation, SBOMs, and engineering evidence for applicable STIG, RMF/ATO, and impact-level requirements. Verify fixes through rescanning and deployment validation; coordinate exceptions and approvals with security owners.
• Support sustainment of federal deployments, including Second Front where applicable, through patching, image updates, configuration changes, and ongoing security remediation within agreed Trase/partner responsibilities.
• Maintain deployment guides, environment inventories, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting documentation. Provide partner onboarding, knowledge transfer, and operational handoffs with clear prerequisites, access boundaries, and support ownership.

Technical leadership

• Lead infrastructure and reliability decisions across RCF/RCP engagements, keeping partner-specific requirements aligned with Trase's shared architecture.
• Set practical standards for secure releases, production readiness, observability, and support handoffs across partner environments.
• Work with the TPM, Product, GRC, and partner teams to clarify requirements, validate acceptance criteria, estimate work, and surface risks and dependencies before making commitments.
• Turn recurring partner deployment and support needs into reusable automation and platform improvements.
• Mentor engineers and partner teams, document decisions, and reduce reliance on individual experts for ongoing operations.

Required Qualifications

• U.S. citizenship is required.
• 10+ years of software, platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps engineering experience, including hands-on ownership of production systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and production cluster operations.
• Strong experience with Helm and infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or Pulumi, including reusable modules, state management, testing, and change review.
• Hands-on infrastructure experience with at least two of AWS, Azure, and GCP, including compute, networking, storage, identity, and managed services.
• Experience deploying and operating software in customer-controlled, private-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or on-premises environments, including adapting cloud-native products for these deployment models.
• Strong understanding of networking, DNS, ingress, load balancing, certificates, IAM, secrets management, persistent storage, and service-to-service security.
• Experience operating CI/CD or GitOps systems for releases, upgrades, and rollbacks, plus observability and incident response for production services.
• Strong software engineering and automation skills in Python, Go, TypeScript, or a similar language, with the ability to work across application and infrastructure layers.
• Experience hardening production infrastructure and container images, investigating vulnerability findings, and delivering validated security fixes with security teams.
• Strong partner-facing communication and troubleshooting skills, with ownership of technical issues from initial report through validated resolution and operational handoff.
• Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted coding and engineering tools to accelerate development, infrastructure automation, troubleshooting, operational analysis, or incident investigation.

Strongly Preferred

• Prior SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering experience supporting national security, defense, federal agencies, or other government programs.
• An active U.S. government security clearance.
• Experience operating in restricted-network, disconnected, regulated, or security-sensitive environments.
• Hands-on familiarity with STIG hardening, NIST controls, FedRAMP, RMF/ATO evidence, or DoD IL4/IL5/IL6 deployment requirements, as applicable to assigned programs.
• Experience with government cloud infrastructure, including AWS GovCloud, and federal deployment platforms such as Second Front/Game Warden.
• Experience with software supply-chain security, SBOMs, artifact signing, FIPS-enabled components, Harbor, or policy as code.
• Experience supporting long-running, stateful, data-intensive, AI/ML, or GPU-enabled workloads.
• Customer-facing, partner engineering, or forward-deployed experience supporting multiple organizations and transferring operational knowledge.

Up to 20% travel may be required.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

Salary Range: $180,000-$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):

For full-time roles

• 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. 

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Applicant Data Disclosure   

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.