Staff Engineer, HMS DevOps/DevEx

About the role

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company whose products support operations worldwide. As a Staff Engineer on the HMS DevOps/DevEx team, you will write automation, configure environments and build the CI/CD pipelines that power the software development lifecycle across Hivemind Solutions. The work is hands-on and focused on engineering maximum velocity, reproducibility and security into distributed developer tooling and cloud testing environments.

Key responsibilities

• Write, configure and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines and runner environments for C++, Python and Node.js projects, ensuring fast compilation and test execution.
• Build, test and deploy automated tooling integrations, webhook dispatchers and state-change scripts connecting GitLab, Jira and Confluence to orchestrate release workflows.
• Write custom Python or Bash extensions for the pi-gov harness, configuring secure, audited LLM routing rules and local container configurations.
• Deploy, scale and configure the Forge simulation and test orchestrator in Azure Gov Cloud, optimizing runner autoscaling and cloud compute consumption.
• Maintain and secure Artifactory package registries, using BuildKit, secret injection and Entra ID integration.
• Help development teams migrate legacy build systems to reproducible Nix environments, writing default Nix derivations and flake configurations.
• Troubleshoot pipeline failures, broken builds, registry access issues and configuration drift across development environments.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Practical experience building, maintaining and scaling enterprise CI/CD systems, with deep expertise in GitLab CI/CD pipelines and runner infrastructure.
• Experience writing scripts (Bash, Python) and using webhooks and APIs to automate engineering tools such as Jira, Confluence and GitLab.
• Experience with containerization (Docker, multi-stage builds) and package managers such as Conan, Poetry or Nix.
• Experience deploying and managing workloads in cloud environments such as Azure Gov Cloud or AWS.
• Experience with secure software development, secret management and identity providers (Active Directory, Entra ID).
• Solid Linux system administration, networking and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET security clearance; U.S. citizenship required.