Lead DevOps Engineer

About the Role

• Pelico runs as an elegant set of ~20 microservices that deploy on a single VM - and scale to Kubernetes for the enterprise. As we grow in the US, our most important deployments are also our hardest: aerospace and defense customers who run Pelico on their own air-gapped, on-premise infrastructure - where their IT team operates the product and we have no access to the cluster, the logs, or the data.
• You'll own that frontier. You'll lead a small DevOps team (3-5) and own how Pelico is packaged, deployed, and operated in environments we can't see - so a customer's IT team can stand it up, run it, diagnose it, and recover it on their own, while we still hit every commitment we make. This is a player-coach role: hands-on in the infrastructure, in the room with customer IT, and accountable for delivery.
• Over the next 12-18 months you'll drive two co-primary tracks: the on-prem deployment frontier - tooling and packaging that get Pelico's current and committed enterprise customers live and self-operable, repeatably, not bespoke - and a federal posture, standing up GovCloud / FedRAMP (controls as code) so Pelico can serve federal and defense customers on certified infrastructure. The federal track is the most probable near-term direction, not a distant maybe.

Your Mission

• Make it operable without us. Design the observability and self-remediation story for air-gapped, customer-run environments - shipped diagnostics, remediation playbooks, health checks, alert auto-classification. Go deep: auto-diagnose and auto-remediate, not just "rerun the pipeline."
• Package it for any environment. Build the Helm charts, Compose stacks, and Terraform/IaC for Pelico's real deployment variants - on-prem single-VM, air-gapped Kubernetes, and private-cloud (GKE/GKS, EKS, AKS) - deployable by customer IT with clean runbooks.
• Deliver on the commitment. Turn an enterprise deliverable - "ship a GKS Helm chart in a month, with three people" - into a roadmap with weekly checkpoints, MVP scope, and a date you hit.
• Make it repeatable - and federal-ready. Turn bespoke deployments into repeatable tooling that gets current and committed customers live without heroics - and stand up Pelico's federal posture (GovCloud / FedRAMP, controls as code), now a co-primary track and the most probable near-term direction.
• Set the boundary. Sit with customer IT and security months ahead, agree the RACI and SLAs, and draw an unambiguous line between what's theirs and what's ours.
• Lead by doing. Stay hands-on (you'll choose ~20-50% infra work), set the bar, grow your engineers, and bring AI tooling into the team the right way.

Your Impact

• Pelico's US growth runs straight through the most demanding deployments in the industry. Whether they succeed comes down to one question: can a customer's IT team operate Pelico without us in the room? Own that, and you turn our toughest customers into our most defensible ones.

Preferred Qualifications & Skills

This is a role for a hands-on DevOps leader who has shipped real systems into environments they didn't control - and who likes being accountable for the outcome. You impose order on ambiguity, you reason fluently about operating software you can't see, and you'd rather build self-service than fight fires.

You'll need

• A track record operating enterprise software in environments you didn't fully control - customer-owned / on-prem / air-gapped - or equivalent depth standing up regulated / government-cloud (GovCloud / FedRAMP) environments (deep experience in either counts; the other is a fast ramp).
• Deep, current hands-on Kubernetes + Helm + Terraform/IaC and Docker/Compose; managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS/AKS) and on-prem/bare-metal.
• Observability you can ship into places you can't reach - Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk; designing diagnostics and remediation for customer self-operation.
• A record of owning committed enterprise deliverables end-to-end with customer IT - RACI, SLAs, checkpoints, scope - and hitting the dates.
• Leading by example - you set the bar by doing; ideally you've managed ~3+ engineers, or you're an exceptional hands-on tech lead ready to build and run a small team.
• Comfort treating security & operability as infrastructure - you've operated in regulated, customer-owned, or on-prem environments and design for auditability and self-service.

Nice to have

• GovCloud and/or FedRAMP experience (strongly preferred / expected) - AWS GovCloud / Azure Government / GCP Assured Workloads, or having taken a system through FedRAMP (Moderate/High), IL, or CMMC authorization. This is now the most probable near-term direction for the role - a strong, expected plus, not a hard requirement.
• Aerospace / defense / government / regulated on-prem experience; air-gap or ITAR/EAR exposure.
• A real self-service / platform-engineering philosophy (golden paths, self-remediation).
• AI-native ways of working - scoped tasks, heavy context, retained ownership.
• Secrets management, backup/DR, upgrade/migration tooling for disconnected sites; Fargate/ECS.

Additional information

If you bring the essentials and a strong mix of the rest, we want to hear from you - we're hiring the person who'll make this real, not a checklist.

What We Offer

• A real ownership mandate over Pelico's hardest, highest-stakes deployments, with equity in a category-defining scale-up.
• Deep, high-leverage problems with real enterprise customers - and the autonomy to solve them your way.
• An AI-native engineering culture and a small, elite team - be challenged, learn, and have fun.
• A foothold in Pelico's growing US presence, an international team of 40+ nationalities, and a real commitment to fair pay and equal opportunity.