DevOps Engineer - Level 3 at Northrop Grumman
Colorado Springs, CO
$103,600–$155,400from the description
Jul 14, 2026
Colorado Springs, CO
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A mid-to-senior DevOps engineering role supporting a modeling and simulation program at a Colorado Springs facility and Schriever Space Force Base. Day-to-day work centers on building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, containerized environments (Docker, Podman), and automated testing integrations using tools like Jenkins, GitLab, and SonarQube. The position suits a cleared STEM professional with hands-on pipeline and Linux experience who can work onsite daily.
Senior level · 5+ years · Colorado Springs, CO · Bachelor's required · Secret clearance · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 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
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $137,233 (middle half $108,638–$170,529). 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 (10)
The posting is titled 'Principal DevOps Engineer - Level 3' but the actual requirements (5 years experience, standard CI/CD and containerization skills) support a Senior-level classification rather than Principal. The 'Principal' label appears to be an internal Northrop Grumman leveling convention rather than an org-wide technical authority role.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role primarily builds and maintains CI/CD pipelines and automation code (pointing to 15-1252 Software Developers), but also has a meaningful infrastructure operations and administration component (15-1244). The software-building emphasis was the deciding factor.
An active Secret clearance is explicitly required at the time of application — not merely the ability to obtain one.
The role is onsite daily at Colorado Springs / Schriever Space Force Base; very limited remote/hybrid work is available.
Degree requirement: a Bachelor's in a STEM field is the baseline, but the JD accepts a Master's + 3 years or a PhD + 1 year as equivalents. Degree requirement is set to Bachelor's as the minimum stated path; equivalent-experience substitution is NOT offered.
The Atlassian tool suite is referenced broadly in the required qualifications; Jira is the most commonly required individual Atlassian tool and is listed explicitly alongside it.
Keycloak is listed under Preferred Qualifications with 'or similar technologies', making it preferred rather than required; alternatives such as HashiCorp Vault would also satisfy this requirement.
Kubernetes and Terraform/Ansible are explicitly called out as 'a plus' under Preferred Qualifications.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): Linux administration.
Requires a 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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