Staff Engineer, HMS DevOps/DevEx (R5447) at Shield AI
Washington
$150,000–$220,000
Jul 23, 2026
Washington
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A DevOps/developer experience engineering role focused on building and maintaining the CI/CD infrastructure that underpins a defense autonomy software platform. Day-to-day work spans authoring GitLab pipelines for C++, Python, and Node.js projects, automating tool integrations across GitLab, Jira, and Confluence, managing Artifactory registries, deploying simulation orchestration in Azure Gov Cloud, and migrating build systems to Nix environments. Suits engineers with hands-on enterprise CI/CD and scripting experience who can obtain a U.S. Secret clearance.
Senior level · San Diego, CA · Secret clearance · Full-time
Pay in the description: $150,000–$220,000
“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 $166,860 (middle half $131,418–$198,246). 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 role is classified as Software Developers (15-1252) because the primary day-to-day work is writing and shipping automation code, CI/CD pipelines, webhook integrations, and custom extensions — not merely operating existing infrastructure. 15-1244 (Network/Systems Admins) is noted as a runner-up given the significant infrastructure configuration and administration duties.
The posting states 'Bachelor's degree … or equivalent practical experience', so no hard degree gate exists.
Clearance is gated: candidates must be able to obtain and maintain an active U.S. SECRET clearance; U.S. citizenship is required.
The job title carries no seniority level; the scope (enterprise CI/CD ownership, cloud deployment, security practices, cross-team migration work) supports a Senior classification.
Conan, Poetry, and Nix are listed together as interchangeable package manager examples under the required qualifications ('such as Conan, Poetry, or Nix'); they are captured as one skill with alternatives. Similarly, Azure Gov Cloud and AWS are listed as interchangeable cloud environment examples.
Artifactory, BuildKit, and Nix derivations/flakes appear in the 'What you'll do' responsibilities narrative rather than the explicit Required Qualifications block, so they are marked preferred.
Node.js and C++ appear as pipeline targets in the responsibilities section, not as required programming skills for the candidate; marked preferred.
LLMs appear in the context of configuring a GenAI routing harness (pi-gov); listed as preferred since it appears only in the responsibilities narrative.
The posting lists multiple U.S. office locations; San Diego, CA is used as the primary CBSA given Shield AI's headquarters, but the exact work location is not specified in this posting.
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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