Staff DevOps Engineer

Ursa Major was founded to address a critical shortfall in the U.S. industrial base and bring a new model to aerospace and defense systems: we design and manufacture the world’s leading propulsion systems for space, hypersonic applications, and missile systems. Our products and technologies require an extraordinary team. A team that will mold tomorrow’s technologies while deploying today’s best. We are an intrinsically motivated team that has a passion for solving problems and empowering each other every day to develop our skills, knowing that there is always room for growth.

DevOps at Ursa Major is a small team. To grow our impact, we provide self-service tools and teach other teams how to work with compute infrastructure using modern approaches. We work with Azure and AWS as our Cloud providers, we have on-premise Kubernetes clusters, and we offer our skillsets to teams to solve other problems such as configuring and supporting some desktop tooling. As we are a small team, the role requires a willingness to learn a technical surface area that can seem large. Recent tasks have included designing and building Windows-based GitHub ephemeral build runners, automating the building of zero-trust compatible Docker base images, building observability dashboards for nginx errors in both on-premise and cloud Kubernetes, understanding how to deploy FedRAMP-moderate AI tooling, and working with cybersecurity to design and implement CUI-appropriate infrastructure as code workflows.

The Staff-level DevOps Engineer joins as we are inflecting from small-team approaches to mature solutions, setting ourselves up for the next several years of infrastructure success. In this vein, we are looking for an engineer who will help us to grow, such as designing a more mature Terraform approach for scalability, an engineer who will have opinions on how to improve our Kubernetes deployment and management strategies, and how to deliver on the promise of our observability tooling. This role requires not only advanced technical competencies but also strong leadership qualities and the ability to mentor and upskill others. The ideal candidate will be adept at solving the most complex issues, driving continuous improvement, and fostering a collaborative and accountable team environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership:
  • Lead the evolution of our Terraform codebase from ad-hoc configurations to a scalable and secure IaC architecture that scales across environments and teams.
  • Champion a batteries-included approach to our infrastructure, such as ensuring all infrastructure is secure by default, that production resources come preconfigured for backups, etc.
  • Translate high-level infrastructure goals into clear roadmaps with measurable milestones and defined ownership.
  • Maintain and improve the security posture of our hybrid environments (Azure, AWS, and on-prem Kubernetes) through proactive monitoring, hardening, and access control.
  • Guide the standardization of deployment and configuration workflows to improve reproducibility, compliance, and auditability.
  • Keep the team focused on providing solutions that allow our customers to self-service their own needs.
• Platform Architecture:
  • Design and evolve the foundational patterns for CI/CD pipelines, and runtime environments across cloud and on-prem platforms.
  • Drive adoption of composable Terraform modules, versioned environments, and policy-as-code to balance flexibility with governance.
  • Write design and architecture documents that shape how services are deployed, observed, and secured, from Kubernetes base images to network segmentation.
• Continuous Improvement:
  • Identify and implement opportunities for process improvement and operational efficiencies.
  • Participate in and conduct regular post-incident reviews and security assessments to inform system improvements and shared learning.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience with DevOps practices.
• Experience with Azure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with
  • On-premise and cloud-hosted Kubernetes, along with container tooling
  • AWS
  • Go, Python, Terraform, Ansible
  • GitHub workflows
  • Cloud security
• Strong leadership and team development skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Effective communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to work collaboratively with diverse teams.

Additional Notes

• The DevOps Engineer will report to the Manager of Platform Engineering.
• The position may require occasional travel.
• The position will start with an on-premise requirement for 1-3 months, but is anticipated to become a hybrid role as we grow into a team together with an average of 2 days a week on-site.

Colorado law requires us to tell you the base compensation range of this role, which is $145,000 - $175,000, determined by your education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. The salary range for this role is intentionally wide as we are evaluating individuals based on their unique experience and abilities to fit our needs. Most importantly, we are excited to meet you, and see if you are a great fit for our team. What we can’t quantify for you are the exciting challenges, supportive team, and amazing culture we enjoy.

Classification: Full-time Exempt

Click here for more information about our awesome benefits.