Principal Cloud Engineer at SAIC
Colorado Springs, CO
$120,001–$160,000from the description
Jul 28, 2026
Colorado Springs, CO
Jul 29, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role supports a DoD/intelligence community contract at SAIC, operating and maintaining on-premises Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure in Colorado Springs. The engineer administers RKE2/Rancher environments, manages deployments via GitOps tooling, applies DoD security compliance (STIGs), and keeps a suite of enterprise services running. It suits an experienced systems/cloud administrator comfortable in classified, air-gapped or on-prem environments rather than a public-cloud software developer.
Senior level · 4+ years · Colorado Springs, CO · Top Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $104,090 (middle half $86,062–$133,513). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The clearance requirement is stated as 'Active Top Secret with the ability to obtain TS/SCI' — the hard gate is an active TS; TS/SCI is an upgrade the candidate must be able to obtain, not necessarily already held.
The degree requirement accepts 4 additional years of experience in lieu of a Bachelor's degree, so no degree is treated as a hard gate.
SOC classification is a close call: the role is titled 'Cloud Engineer' and includes automation/deployment work (pointing toward 15-1252), but the day-to-day responsibilities are dominated by operating and administering on-prem infrastructure, applying STIGs, managing VMs, and maintaining SOPs — more consistent with 15-1244. Alloy (Grafana Alloy) appears in the required stack but is a very recently renamed product; it is captured implicitly under the Grafana/Loki ecosystem and not emitted as a separate skill to avoid confusion.
Ansible, scripting (Bash/Python/Shell), LDAP/OIDC, and CKA/CKAD certifications all appear under 'Desired Qualifications' and are marked preferred accordingly.
Requires a Top Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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