Senior Software Engineer 3 - (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform)Clearance: TS/SCI - Polygraph required
Position ID: 20-24-037-SWE3
Location: Annapolis Junction, Maryland
Description:Join us in building the next generation of AI infrastructure that will power innovation across the customer organization. We're seeking a senior software engineer to support our Platform team, which owns the AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and security posture that every AI capability in the organization runs on. In this role, you'll help build and maintain the foundation for customer AI capabilities while supporting a broader ecosystem of AI-enabled applications. Your focus will be deploying and maintaining reliable, secure infrastructure that the rest of our AI services depend on. Requirements shift quickly as mission needs evolve and new technologies emerge, so you'll keep sharpening your skills and learning to turn loosely defined problems into working solutions.
- Lead the design, deployment, and maintenance of the cloud infrastructure used by the organization's AI capabilities (AWS, Kubernetes).
- Translate high-level stakeholder goals into engineering outcomes and platform solutions.
- Work within ambiguous problem spaces and define structured solutions the team can execute against.
- Mentor engineers and grow development best practices, engineering standards, and technical governance for the team.
- Establish and enforce security best practices for infrastructure systems and data, including certificate and identity management.
Position Required Skills:- Experience with AWS services such as EKS, Terraform, IAM, and Route 53.
- Experience with Kubernetes and Helm/Kustomize.
- Experience with Docker/containerization.
- Experience with Argo CD and/or other CI/CD frameworks.
- Experience configuring and using observability tooling such as the Elastic Stack (Kibana) and Grafana/Prometheus.
- Experience with certificate management and cloud-native security practices.
- Experience supporting cloud-native architecture and maintaining production software and infrastructure.
- Ability to take high-level mission goals and transform them into engineering outcomes.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.
- Ability to balance hands-on engineering with leadership and coordination responsibilities.
Nice to Haves- Experience developing technical policies and governance frameworks.
- Experience with AI inference serving technologies (vLLM, LiteLLM, etc.).
- Previous experience with agentic frameworks.
- Knowledge of vector databases and embedding systems.
- Familiarity with LLMs and AI hosting concepts.
SWE3 Qualifications:A minimum of twelve (12) years of experience as a SWE in programs and contracts of similar scope, type, and complexity is required. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related discipline from an accredited college or university is required. Four (4) years of additional SWE experience on projects with similar software processes may be substituted for a bachelor's degree.
Salary Range: $241k-$295k (Annually)
The range displayed above is a likely salary range for this position. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possible contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.
Akina is a Woman Owned, Service Disabled, Veteran Owned, Small Business, looking for talented and ambitious individuals to join our team. We offer a generous compensation package that includes 24 days PTO accrued annually and 11 federal holidays. Our 401k is 100% vested on your start date and the company makes a direct contribution worth 10% of your salary. Akina covers 100% of healthcare costs for employees and 50% toward dependents. We offer educational assistance towards college classes and will cover costs associated with job related training and certifications.Akina is committed to excellence and creating innovative and flexible solutions for our clients. We are a small company with an open ear to our employees' needs in order to attract and retain quality talent that enables our customer's mission.We are an equal employment opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. 
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