Senior Infrastructure - DevOps Engineer

AV is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Senior DevOps Engineer to join a customer-facing, mission-focused program on an establish project. The selected candidate will join a high performing software development team building and maintaining a 24/7 system, data flow, and application directly supporting U.S. national security. We need an additional team member to support (and lead) efforts to apply infrastructure engineering and dev Ops best practices for deployments on classified networks. Work location is out of the AV office in Herndon, Virginia or Annapolis Junction, Maryland.

This project includes continual data flows, cloud infrastructure on multiple environments (including classified systems), supporting increasingly complex computing and analytics features, and need for high availability and reliability.

Position Responsibilities

• Lead the infrastructure management of for web applications and large-scale databases for a federal government national security customer on a high-profile topic of global importance related to an emerging technology
• Deploy, maintain, and improve infrastructure and data flows on a classified customer network
• Work in a "start-up-like" environment that emphasizes initiative, velocity, customer responsiveness, and collaboration alongside a team of full-stack software engineers using Agile methodologies
• Implement agentic coding and other enterprise AI systems to expand capabilities and to improve team efficiency
• Build, scale, and maintain databases that ingest and normalize a variety of file formats
• Use your experience in applying best practices in cloud infrastructure engineering and database architectures

Do you have experience in AI?, Do you have a Master's degree?, * At least 8 years or more of practical software engineering experience. A Bachelor's Degree may be substituted for 4 years of experience. A Master's Degree may be substituted for 6 years of experience. A Ph.D. may be substituted for 7 years of experience.

• Advanced experience with AWS cloud infrastructure
• Demonstrated success as a cloud infrastructure engineer, to include deep understanding of infrastructure as code (IaS), DevOps, systems administration, or as a system engineer
• Proven understanding and implementation of industry best practices for IaC and database engineering
• Experience building and maintaining a large-scale database, such as loading and managing terabytes of data
• Familiarization with using AI coding agents in a transparent, reliable, and dependent way, especially since technical capabilities advanced in December 2025
• Proficiency in technologies such as AWS, Terraform, Ansible, RDS, NiFi, Linux, and Jenkins
• Active TS/SCI clearance

Other Qualifications & Desired Competencies

• 12 years of experience or more for expanded responsibilities
• Experience with PKI/Oauth/OIDC and implementing role-based access controls
• Experience with Kubernetes, lambda functions, CDK, Pulumi, Docker, trunk-based Git strategies, Route53, MongoDB, and managing a data lake
• Hands-on experience planning and executing AWS database migrations, such as MongoDB on EC2 to Amazon DocumentDB, relational workloads to Amazon Aurora/RDS, and OLTP data to Amazon Redshift for analytics
• AWS Certifications
• Systems Engineer Certification
• Working and succeeding on teams following Agile methodologies, This position requires access to information that is subject to compliance with the International Traffic Arms Regulations ("ITAR") and/or the Export Administration Regulations ("EAR"). In order to comply with the requirements of the ITAR and/or the EAR, applicants must qualify as a U.S. person under the ITAR and the EAR, or a person to be approved for an export license by the governing agency whose technology comes under its jurisdiction. Please understand that any job offer that requires approval of an export license will be conditional on AeroVironment's determination that it will be able to obtain an export license in a time frame consistent with AeroVironment's business requirements. A "U.S. person" according to the ITAR definition is a U.S. citizen, U.S. lawful permanent resident (green card holder), or protected individual such as a refugee or asylee. See 22 CFR § 120.15. Some positions will require current U.S. Citizenship due to contract, U.S. Citizenship is required. Secret or Top Secret clearance, or the ability obtain a clearance is desired.

Pulled from the full job description

• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Paid holidays

We don't just build defense technology-we redefine what's possible. As the premier autonomous systems company in the U.S., AV delivers breakthrough capabilities across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. From AI-powered drones and loitering munitions to integrated autonomy and space resilience, our technologies shape the future of warfare and protect those who serve. Founded by legendary innovator Dr. Paul MacCready, AV has spent over 50 years pushing the boundaries of what unmanned systems can do. Our heritage includes seven platforms in the Smithsonian-but we're not building history, we're building what's next. If you're ready to build technology that matters-with speed, scale, and purpose-there's no better place to do it than AV.