Automation Services Engineer

We have an outstanding career opportunity for an Automation Services Engineer to join a leading Company located in Leesburg, Virginia.

Salary: $150k-160k per year

**US Citizenship is required.**
**Candidate must have the ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret/SCI Security Clearance.**

Join a growing team responsible for building the automation, tooling, and services that power internal engineering teams. This team operates as a platform enablement function, creating the infrastructure, CI/CD validation pipelines, and automation frameworks that other teams depend on to reliably deliver outcomes. The ideal candidate is a hands-on infrastructure generalist-someone who has worked with real systems in production and can build automation around them.

Why Join This Team

• Work on the core platform that powers engineering across the organization
• High visibility and impact across multiple teams
• Strong emphasis on automation, open-source, and modern infrastructure practices
• Opportunity to work on emerging internal AI use cases
• Broad technical exposure across systems, networking, CI/CD, and tooling

Job Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain infrastructure automation frameworks using Ansible and related tools
• Develop and manage CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) for validation, testing, and deployment
• Design and implement repeatable, reliable system configurations using infrastructure-as-code practices
• Automate installation, configuration, patching, and validation of systems and services
• Build and maintain nightly/continuous validation pipelines to detect drift and ensure system health
• Integrate and 'glue together' open-source tools and platforms into cohesive solutions
• Support internal engineering teams by delivering platform services and automation tooling
• Troubleshoot issues across:
  • Linux systems
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Virtualization
• Build or customize OS images for consistent deployments (Packer or similar tools)
• Contribute to internal AI initiatives (locally hosted AI use cases and tooling)
• Work within Git-based workflows (merge requests, code reviews, branching strategies)
• Build vs Operate mindset - prefers creating systems/tools over manual ops work
• Strong infrastructure automation capability
• True platform engineering orientation (building for other engineers)
• Solid Linux foundation
• Ability to connect systems and tools into cohesive platforms
• Interest in locally hosted AI and emerging internal tooling initiatives

Basic Hiring Criteria:

• High school diploma or equivalent

• Strong Linux systems administration experience (real-world, production environments)
• Hands-on experience with one or more configuration/automation tools:
  • Ansible (preferred)
  • Puppet, Chef, Salt
• Experience with:
  • Infrastructure automation (IaC mindset)
  • CI/CD pipelines (GitLab preferred)
  • Git-based workflows
• Ability to:
  • Troubleshoot across multiple layers (OS, network, services)
  • Turn manual processes into automated, repeatable workflows
  • Work across a broad technical stack rather than a narrow specialty

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience in:
  • Platform engineering / infrastructure teams
  • Managed services providers (MSPs), hosting, or service providers
  • Supporting internal engineering teams
• Experience with:
  • Image building tools (Packer strongly preferred)
  • Virtualization platforms (Proxmox, VMware, KVM, etc.)
  • Open-source infrastructure and software ecosystems
  • Networking fundamentals (routing, firewalls, connectivity troubleshooting)
• Familiarity with:
  • Automating validation pipelines (including nightly checks)
  • Managing multi-environment configurations and inventories
  • Scripting or light development (Python, Bash, Go)
  • Experience with:
    • Proxmox or similar
    • GitLab CI/CD at scale
    • Open-source tool integration
  • Exposure to:
    • Configuration management ecosystems
    • Internal platform tooling
• Engineering Mindset
  • Automation-first thinking (idempotent, repeatable, testable systems)
  • Strong troubleshooting instincts across layers
  • Bias toward practical, maintainable solutions
  • Focus on:
    • Reliability
    • Observability
    • Documentation
    • Long-term ownership

Benefits offered vary by contract. Depending on your temporary assignment, benefits may include direct deposit, free career counseling services, 401(k), select paid holidays, short-term disability insurance, skills training, employee referral bonus, and affordable medical coverage plan, and DailyPay (in some locations). For a full description of benefits available to you, be sure to talk with your recruiter.