Kubernetes Engineer

At Accenture Federal Services, nothing matters more than helping the US federal government make the nation stronger and safer and life better for people. Our 13,000+ people are united in a shared purpose to pursue the limitless potential of technology and ingenuity for clients across defense, national security, public safety, civilian, and military health organizations.

Join Accenture Federal Services, a technology company within global Accenture. Recognized as a Glassdoor Top 100 Best Place to Work, we offer a collaborative and caring community where you feel like you belong and are empowered to grow, learn and thrive through hands-on experience, certifications, industry training and more.

Join us to drive positive, lasting change that moves missions and the government forward!

About the Role

As federal agencies modernize toward containerized, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes has become the backbone for how mission applications are deployed, scaled, and secured. As a Mid-Level Kubernetes Engineer at AFS, you will design and operate container orchestration platforms that support production workloads for defense, civilian, and public health clients — frequently within on-prem, air-gapped, or hardened cloud environments subject to strict federal security requirements (e.g., DoD hardening guides, STIGs).

You'll be responsible for the reliability, security, and performance of the platform's application teams build on top of, and for helping those teams adopt Kubernetes patterns correctly.

What You Will Do

Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, or on-prem/bare-metal) supporting federal client production workloads

Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for containerized application deployment, including GitOps workflows

Harden clusters to meet federal security requirements, including DISA STIGs, Pod Security Standards, network policies, and RBAC configuration

Implement and manage service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), ingress controllers, and secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets, or cloud-native equivalents)

Build observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry) to monitor cluster and application health

Automate infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) for repeatable, auditable deployments

Troubleshoot cluster and application incidents, from networking and scheduling issues to resource contention and failed deployments

Partner with application development teams to containerize services, define resource requests/limits, and adopt Kubernetes-native patterns (health checks, autoscaling, rolling deployments)

Support ATO and continuous monitoring processes, including vulnerability scanning and remediation for container images and cluster configurations

Document platform architecture, operational runbooks, and onboarding guides for application teams

What You Bring

Platform Mindset: You think about the system that other engineers build on, not just the feature in front of you. You design for reliability and repeatability, and you assume your work will run unattended at 2am and needs to be debuggable then.

Security as a Default, Not an Afterthought: You bring hardening, least-privilege access, and compliance requirements into the design from day one, especially in DoD/federal contexts where the bar is higher and the environments are less forgiving.

Calm, Methodical Incident Response: When a cluster or workload misbehaves, you isolate the problem systematically — logs, events, metrics, network paths — rather than guessing, and you communicate clearly with stakeholders while you work it.

Enablement Over Gatekeeping: You'd rather teach an application team to deploy safely on the platform than be the bottleneck for every release. You build guardrails and self-service tooling, not just tickets.

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience

4 years of experience operating Kubernetes in production, including cluster administration, workload scheduling, and troubleshooting

Strong Linux systems fundamentals and scripting ability (Bash, Python, or Go)

Hands-on experience with Helm, Kustomize, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)

Solid understanding of container networking, RBAC, and Kubernetes security primitives (Pod Security Standards, network policies, secrets management)

Must be a U.S. Citizen

Preferred Qualifications

Experience operating Kubernetes within DoD, IC, or other federal environments subject to STIGs, ATO, or Assured Workloads requirements

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)

Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)

Familiarity with a major cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering (EKS, GKE, AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift

Experience supporting air-gapped or disconnected/limited-connectivity Kubernetes deployments

Experience with Kubernetes-based AI/ML workload orchestration (Kubeflow, KServe, GPU scheduling)

Contributions to open-source Kubernetes/CNCF projects

Clearance

An active TS/SCI clearance is required

As required by local law, Accenture Federal Services provides reasonable ranges of compensation for hired roles based on labor costs in the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia . The base pay range for this position in these locations is shown below. Compensation for roles at Accenture Federal Services varies depending on a wide array of factors, including but not limited to office location, role, skill set, and level of experience. Accenture Federal Services offers a wide variety of benefits. You can find more information on benefits here. We accept applications on an on-going basis and there is no fixed deadline to apply.

The pay range for the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia is:

$100,200 — $180,100 USD

What We Believe

As a company wholly dedicated to serving the US federal government, we bring together the best talent to help reinvent how federal agencies operate and deliver greater value for their mission and the American people. We have an unwavering commitment to creating a culture in which all our people are respected, feel a sense of belonging, and have equal opportunity. As a business imperative, every person at Accenture Federal Services has the responsibility to create and sustain a culture where everyone feels welcomed and included. This is grounded in our core values and our experience that hiring and developing great people who reflect different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds is key to driving innovation and delivering the results that our clients and the country count on.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

We believe that no one should be discriminated against because of their differences. All employment decisions shall be made without regard to age, race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, disability status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, citizenship status or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law. Our rich diversity makes us more innovative, more competitive, and more creative, which helps us better serve our clients and our communities. For details, view a copy of the Accenture Federal Services Equal Opportunity Policy Statement.

Accenture Federal Services is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Additionally, as an Affirmative Action Employer for Veterans and Individuals with Disabilities, Accen