Staff DevOps Engineer
Northrop Grumman · Aurora, CO
$177,000–$265,600from the description
Jul 23, 2026
Aurora, CO
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level DevOps/site reliability role focused on sustaining and incrementally improving existing on-premises mission systems rather than designing new ones. Day-to-day work covers administering GitLab CI/CD pipelines, Nexus artifact repositories, Apache NiFi, on-prem Kubernetes clusters, and Grafana/Prometheus monitoring — including patching, incident response, security controls, and change management documentation. An active TS/SCI clearance is required at application, and candidates must be able to obtain a Full Scope Polygraph.
Senior level · 12+ years · Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
Advertised as Staff, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 3 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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 $107,401 (middle half $89,864–$133,850). 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 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The posting is titled 'Staff DevOps Engineer' but the actual scope — operating and maintaining existing on-prem infrastructure within established architectures, implementing changes defined by senior engineers, and collaborating with leads and architects — is consistent with a Senior individual contributor rather than a Staff-level role setting cross-team technical direction. Seniority is assessed as Senior accordingly.
The role is primarily focused on operating and maintaining existing on-prem infrastructure (patching, administering, monitoring, incident response) rather than building new software, which is why 15-1244 is preferred over 15-1252. However, the CI/CD and DevOps toolchain work introduces meaningful software-adjacent activity, making 15-1252 a credible runner-up.
Two locations are mentioned: Aurora, CO (primary) and Fairfax, VA (alternative). The CBSA reflects Aurora/Denver as the primary listed location.
The degree requirement accepts equivalent experience in lieu of a degree ('Will consider an additional 4+ years of experience in lieu of degree'), so the degree requirement is set to None. The overall years minimum of 12 reflects the Bachelor's + 12 years path (the highest stated floor); the Master's + 10 and PhD + 7 paths are lower floors.
Clearance requires an active TS/SCI at time of application AND the ability to obtain a Full Scope Polygraph — this is a hard gate.
Bash and Python are listed as alternatives under a single 'at least one scripting language' requirement; both are named so Python appears in alternatives.
Terraform and Ansible appear together under Preferred Qualifications as interchangeable configuration management tools; each is emitted separately with the other as an alternative to reflect that either satisfies the same preferred requirement.
ELK/EFK are listed as examples of log aggregation platforms under Preferred Qualifications.
Requires a TS/SCI 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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