Principal DevOps Engineer
Mount Indie · San Diego, CA
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Jul 13, 2026
San Diego, CA
Jul 20, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
Senior level · 12+ years · National · Bachelor's required · 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.
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 $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
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)
No work location is specified in the posting; CBSA and state are left blank. The role involves defense/tactical edge systems and likely requires on-site presence, but this cannot be confirmed from the text.
The clearance gate is nuanced: US citizenship is explicitly required (hard gate), but an active Secret or Top Secret clearance is listed under 'Nice to have' — so the clearance requirement is set to None. Hiring managers should note that candidates may need to obtain a clearance post-hire.
SOC classification is Medium confidence. The role is primarily about building, architecting, and shipping CI/CD and DevSecOps platforms (software engineering work), which maps to Software Developers (15-1252). However, the significant infrastructure operations scope (on-prem vSphere, networking, monitoring) creates some overlap with 15-1244.
The 'Principal' title is advertised, but the actual scope — while broad — is characteristic of a Senior engineer at a defense/embedded systems firm rather than a true org-wide Principal. The 12+ years requirement and cross-team mentorship are consistent with Senior.
C++ is listed as the preferred strongly typed language; the requirement is for proficiency in 'a strongly typed language (preferably C++)' — captured as a must-have with C++ as the named skill since it is in the Requirements section.
vCenter/vSphere/ESXi are listed together in the infrastructure management section; vSphere is used as the canonical name covering the VMware stack.
Agile/Scrum is listed in the Requirements section and captured as a must-have, though it names no specific tooling beyond Jira.
GNS3 appears only in the infrastructure narrative list alongside Jira and vCenter; it is retained as a preferred skill given its specificity but is not a hard gate.
AI integration into CI/CD pipelines appears under 'Nice to have' and is not captured as a discrete named tool since no specific product is named.
Read the full posting
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