Staff Platform Engineer (GitLab, Kubernetes, JFrog Artifactory)

HonorVet Technologies is a Service Disable Veteran-Owned IT staffing firm, ISO 9001, and ISO 27001 certified, working with federal agencies, state governments, and Fortune 500 enterprise clients across the US. What makes us different isn't a tagline; it's the way we work. We don't forward resumes and hope for the best. We take the time to understand where a professional like you are headed and only reach out when we genuinely believe there's a fit worth exploring. I came across your profile, and something stood out.

Job Title: Staff Platform Engineer (GitLab, Kubernetes, JFrog Artifactory)
Location: Flexible (Hybrid) - 2-3 days in the office at San Diego, CA or Kirkland, WA office.
Duration: 12 months to start with the possibility of extension

Overview:
This Staff Systems Engineer role owns strategy and execution for client's critical developer platforms, including enterprise GitLab supporting 3,000+ users and JFrog Artifactory. The role leads cloud-native transformation, mentors team members, and establishes technical direction for platform engineering.

What You Will Do:

• Own operational strategy and technical direction for GitLab and Artifactory platforms
• Lead cloud-native transformations, Kubernetes migrations, and GitOps adoption
• Drive architecture for multi-region high-availability deployments and active-active patterns
• Design self-healing systems with automated remediation and chaos engineering practices
• Establish cloud-native best practices, including 12-factor apps, containerization, and observability
• Mentor team members on automation patterns and cloud-native architectures
• Influence organizational standards for platform engineering and developer experience
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted operations, eBPF, and service mesh
• Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs with a continuous improvement focus

Skills: Required:

• BS in computer science or equivalent experience
• 7+ years operating and architecting enterprise-scale platforms
• 5+ years of self-managed GitLab experience, including Geo, high availability, and disaster recovery
• 5+ years of Artifactory experience, including Hub/Edge, federation, and enterprise deployments
• 3+ years of deep Kubernetes experience, including operators, CRDs, service mesh, and multi-cluster environments
• 7+ years of expert Linux experience, including kernel, networking, and performance tuning
• PostgreSQL high availability experience, such as Patroni, and advanced networking knowledge, including BGP, anycast, and zero-trust architectures

Additional Requirements:
Cloud-Native Expertise

• Deep knowledge of cloud computing, infrastructure, and architecture patterns
• Experience with major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, and their managed services
• Experience with cloud-native tooling, including Kubernetes operators, Helm, ArgoCD, and Flux
• Experience with service mesh technologies, including Istio, and infrastructure-as-code tools, including Terraform
• Experience with cloud-native observability, including Prometheus, and distributed tracing
• Experience with cloud-native security, including OPA, Trivy, and SBOM practices
• Production-grade automation experience with Python, Go, and Bash
• CI/CD platform design experience at scale
• Experience with FedRAMP IL4/IL5
• Proven mentorship and team development experience
• Strong communication and cross-team influence skills
• Growth mindset, humility, and commitment to continuous development

Preferred

• Open-source contributions to Kubernetes, GitLab, or Artifactory projects
• Experience with eBPF observability/security, WebAssembly, or MLOps
• Published technical writing or conference talks
• Developer platform or platform-as-a-service experience
• SRE practices and chaos engineering experience.