Sr. Consulting Engineer

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) is specifically designed to address the unique security and operational needs of the U.S. Government and military as it relates to application modernization, containers, and Kubernetes.

Rancher is a complete open-source software stack for teams adopting containers. It addresses the operations and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters at scale, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

RGS supports all Rancher products with U.S. based American citizens with the highest security clearances who are currently supporting programs across the Department of Defense, Intelligence, Energy, and civilian agencies.

POSITION SUMMARY
As a Senior Consulting Engineer at Rancher Government Solutions, you will be a strategic technical force responsible for delivering expert-level implementation within a team of engineers and architects. Driving mission success focused on the Rancher portfolio of products within the Federal Government. You will work directly with our clients, providing subject matter expertise within the delivery team and acting as liaison to the executive level customer leadership. Leading by example with architectural guidance, and hands-on keyboard engineering activity to ensure the success of complex security requirements and compliance for container environments, CI/CD, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Kubernetes initiatives. This role is instrumental in translating customer needs into robust, secure, and scalable production and mission environments.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Technical Leadership & Architecture:

• Act as a trusted technical leader and hands-on keyboard engineer for government agency customers, focusing on building, deploying, and maintaining Rancher-based Kubernetes and Container solutions.
• Provide expert-level DevOps technical engineering support, architecture design, and troubleshooting assistance across the entire Rancher product portfolio and complimentary open-source technologies (e.g., Kubernetes, Prometheus, CI/CD tools).
• Develop technical solutions, proof-of-concepts, and reference architectures to help solve unique and complex customer problems, ensuring solutions meet stringent government security requirements.
• Maintain an expert-level understanding of the Rancher products and adjacent technologies like Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and security tooling.
• Collaborate directly with customers and partners to implement, integrate, and operationalize solutions based on Rancher, ensuring alignment with their long-term IT infrastructure and application development objectives.
• Act as an advocate for our customers by understanding their feature requests, use cases, and strategic goals, and communicating this critical feedback to internal Product Management and Engineering teams.
• Demonstrate the technical impact and value of Rancher solutions for users through compelling presentations, deep dives, and hands-on workshops.
• Develop and maintain strong, long-term technical relationships with key customer stakeholders and partners within strategic accounts.
• Perform analysis, design, and implementation to install, configure, and maintain software in air-gapped and on-premise platforms utilizing IaC and Configuration as Code (CaC) methodologies.
• Leverage deep technical knowledge of virtualization infrastructure and security protocols to deploy, improve, and harden complex infrastructure against rigorous government standards.
• Prioritize and research solutions to resolve complex integration, testing, and performance issues; troubleshoot application deployment failures to ensure mission readiness across the delivery team.
• Provide guidance and direction to fellow DevSecOps developers and administrators while interfacing effectively with multiple technical disciplines in a team environment.

Thought Leadership & Community Growth:

• Act as a public technical representative of RGS by creating technical white papers, blog posts, and videos, and by speaking at industry events, conferences, and seminars to educate and engage the broader community.
• Contribute to the development of technical documentation, best practices, and knowledge sharing to support the wider RGS Services organization.
• Other duties as assigned.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 5-10 years of experience working as a field engineer, professional services consultant, or hands-on DevOps/SRE/Systems Engineer focused on infrastructure and container technology.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes (5+ years), containers, and orchestration (Rancher, Kubernetes, Docker) for both operations, development, and security.
• Extensive experience with DevOps concepts, CI/CD pipeline development (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, ArgoCD), and automation software (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).
• Excellent communication, consulting, and presentation skills, with proven ability to convey complex technical concepts to diverse, cleared end-users both in-person and virtually.
• Proven experience creating technical content (white papers, blog posts) or presenting at technical forums/events.
• Demonstrated problem-solving and analytical capabilities, with a proactive, self-motivated, and results-oriented mindset focused on customer success.
• Secret to Top Secret Clearance preferred