Cloud Engineer

About Agile Defense   At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. That’s why we always look to the future and embrace change with an unmovable spirit and the courage to build for what comes next.   Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility—leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation’s vital interests.
Title: Cloud Engineers, Senior Engineers, Architects & Automation Specialists (CBP) Clearance: Active Top Secret with SCI eligibility, ability to obtain and maintain a CBP Background Investigation (CBP BI) and EOD, active BI strongly preferred. We can begin processing for candidates who do not hold one. Citizenship: U.S. Citizenship required Location: Reston, VA - Hybrid 3-5 days Salary Range: Pipeline posting, no set salary Signing Bonus: $10,000 for candidates with an active CBP BI. Payable after 90 days; standard terms apply.  

The Work

U.S. Customs and Border Protection runs continuous operations across more than 300 land, air, and sea ports of entry, plus Border Patrol stations and the Air and Marine Operations Center. The applications behind that work do not get a maintenance evening. When a service is slow or unavailable, an officer is standing at a checkpoint waiting on a biometric check, or an agent is running out of time on a court-mandated processing deadline. DHS oversight reviews have documented outages that halted passenger screening applications for hundreds of hours, and processing records that arrived too late to prosecute.   We are hiring cloud engineers, architects, and automation specialists to build and run the environments those applications depend on. You will work on infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, identity and access, monitoring, resilience, and cost, alongside network engineers, security staff, and the field teams who deal with what happens at the sites themselves.   Two things are worth knowing before you apply. Federal accreditation governs the pace here, so a design that cannot be explained to a security reviewer is not finished, no matter how well it runs. And the cloud is not the whole environment. A meaningful part of the job is making new services work with systems that were built long before anyone used the word cloud, and that are not going away on your schedule.

What Success Looks Like

Objective 1: Stand up cloud environments that hold up under continuous operational load

• Services you deploy survive their first real peak without emergency intervention.
• The failure of one component degrades the service rather than stopping it.
• Someone on call at two in the morning can tell what broke from the telemetry, without calling you to interpret it.
• Capacity and cost decisions get made before somebody escalates them.

⠀Objective 2: Replace manual work with automation people are willing to trust

• Environments get rebuilt from code, and the code matches what is actually running.
• Deployments that used to need a person watching them now run unattended.
• When automation fails, it fails visibly and leaves a trail somebody else can follow.
• Engineers stop keeping private scripts, because the shared tooling does the job.

⠀Objective 3: Clear accreditation without letting it become the project

• Security controls are designed in rather than retrofitted after a review finds them missing.
• Evidence for control assessments comes out of the pipeline instead of a documentation sprint before every deadline.
• You can explain to a security reviewer what a change does and why it is safe, in terms that answer their question rather than yours.

Where You'd Fit

We are hiring across several levels, plus one specialist lane. You do not need to pick one before applying. Tell us where you think you land and we will talk about it.

• Automation Specialist. You own the pipelines and tooling the rest of the team builds on. You decide how something gets automated, and when a manual step is not yet worth the cost of removing.
• Cloud Engineer. You own a service, an environment, or a workload. You make routine build and configuration calls yourself and bring the consequential ones to a review.
• Senior Cloud Engineer. You take the problems that arrive without a clear answer, including the ones that cross into network or security. Other engineers check their approach with you before they commit to it.
• Cloud Architect. You set the patterns others build against, and you are accountable when a pattern meets an operational or accreditation reality it did not anticipate.

What You Bring

Preferred Experience

• You have run production workloads in a government cloud environment where an outage cost something beyond a missed sprint.
• You have written infrastructure as code that other people used without needing you in the room to explain it.
• You have taken a system through a federal authorization process and can say what you would do differently the next time.
• You have integrated cloud services with legacy systems you could not replace, and can describe the compromises you made.
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
• You work comfortably in more than one platform's tooling and are not dependent on a single vendor's console.
• Cloud platform and security certifications are useful, but they are not a substitute for having done the work.

A note on timing

We are staffing this program now. If you already hold an active CBP BI and EOD, your start date is short and a $10,000 signing bonus comes with the role, payable after 90 days under standard terms. We would like to talk this week. If you do not, we can begin processing a CBP BI for you. That takes months rather than weeks, so applying now means joining a pipeline rather than starting immediately. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out after you apply.

Employee Benefits

Agile's benefits offerings include, dependent upon position, Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Paid Time Off, Holiday Pay, short-term and long-term Disability, Retirement and Learning and Development opportunities as well as other optional benefit elections.Our Core Values   Employees of Agile Defense are our number one priority, and the importance we place on our culture here is fundamental. Our culture is alive and evolving, but it always stays true to its roots. Here, you are valued as a family member, and we believe that we can accomplish great things together. Agile Defense has been highly successful in the past few years due to our employees and the culture we create together.    What makes us Agile? We call it the 6Hs, the values that define our culture and guide everything we do. Together, these values infuse vibrancy, integrity, and a tireless work ethic into advancing the most important national security and critical civilian missions. It's how we show up every day. It's who we are.  

• Happy - Be Infectious. Happiness multiplies and creates a positive and connected environment where motivation and satisfaction have an outsized effect on everything we do.
• Helpful - Be Supportive. Being helpful is the foundation of teamwork, resulting in a supportive atmosphere where collaboration flourishes, and collective success is celebrated.
• Honest - Be Trustworthy. Honesty serves as our compass, ensuring transparent communication and ethical conduct, essential to who we are and the complex domains we support.
• Humble - Be Grounded. Success is not achieved alone, humility ensures a culture of mutual respect, encouraging open communication, and a willingness to learn from one another and take on any task.
• Hungry - Be Eager. Our hunger for excellence drives an insatiable appetite for innovation and continuous improvement, propelling us forward in the face of new and unprecedented challenges.
• Hustle - Be Driven. Hustle is reflected in our relentless work ethic, where we are each committed to going above and beyond to advance the mission and achieve success.

  Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities