DevOps Enablement Engineer / SDLC Lead

Position Summary

ECS DevLabs is seeking a DevOps Enablement Engineer who will serve as the primary point of engagement between ECS development teams and the DevLabs platform. This role combines hands-on DevSecOps enablement with product ownership responsibilities — understanding what ECS teams actually need to deliver successfully, translating those needs into platform requirements, and ensuring the SDLC ecosystem evolves to meet real-world demand.

You will own the intake process for development team onboarding, gather and prioritize requirements across multiple project teams, map decision trees for technology and workflow choices, and drive adoption of standardized CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, and secure development practices built on Platform One Big Bang and AWS EKS. A core part of this role is owning the developer toolkit experience — managing platforms like Coder (cloud-based development workspaces) and championing adoption of similar tools that reduce friction, standardize environments, and accelerate time-to-productivity for new project teams.

This is not a back-office infrastructure role. You will be embedded with development teams, running discovery sessions, resolving blockers, and shaping the platform roadmap based on direct engagement with the engineers who use it.

Job Description

The DevOps Enablement Engineer will drive SDLC maturity across ECS DevLabs by serving as the product-minded bridge between development teams and platform engineering. You will own the feedback loop — gathering requirements from ECS project teams, filtering and prioritizing them against platform capabilities and constraints, and working with platform engineering to deliver solutions that accelerate delivery.

Responsibilities span team engagement and requirements discovery, developer toolkit ownership (Coder workspaces and similar self-service developer platforms), CI/CD pipeline enablement, security scanning integration, GitOps deployment support, and continuous improvement of the developer experience.

Team Engagement & Product Ownership

• Serve as the primary DevLabs liaison to ECS development teams, building relationships and maintaining ongoing engagement.
• Conduct discovery sessions and requirements gathering with project teams to understand their workflows, pain points, and delivery goals.
• Filter, prioritize, and translate team needs into actionable platform requirements and backlog items.
• Develop and maintain decision tree frameworks that guide teams through technology choices, deployment patterns, and workflow options.
• Own the onboarding intake process — assess team readiness, define onboarding plans, and track adoption progress.
• Act as an internal product owner for the SDLC ecosystem, ensuring platform capabilities align with what teams actually need to ship software.
• Establish feedback loops to continuously capture team experience and drive platform improvements.
• Communicate platform capabilities, constraints, and roadmap to development teams and leadership.

Developer Toolkit & Experience Management

• Own the lifecycle and administration of Coder, the cloud-based developer workspace platform — including template design, workspace policies, resource right-sizing, and version upgrades.
• Build, maintain, and curate a library of Coder workspace templates per tech stack (Go, Python, Node.js/React, data science, ML/GPU, full-stack) so project teams get a fully provisioned dev environment in minutes, not days.
• Drive adoption of Coder and similar self-service developer tools across project teams as the standard onboarding path — replacing ad-hoc local setups with reproducible, secure, cloud-hosted workspaces.
• Evaluate and pilot emerging developer experience platforms (Coder, Gitpod, GitHub Codespaces-equivalents, internal developer portals like Backstage) and recommend adoption where they advance the platform.
• Continuously measure and improve developer time-to-first-commit, environment provisioning time, and onboarding friction — treat developer experience as a product metric.
• Partner with the SRE on Coder workspace health, cost optimization (idle workspace cleanup, instance right-sizing), and template performance.
• Maintain documentation, "Getting Started" guides, and tutorials that help teams self-serve common developer toolkit operations.

DevSecOps Enablement

• Design and maintain standardized CI/CD pipeline templates (GitLab CI).
• Implement DevSecOps practices including:
  • Container image scanning (Trivy, Iron Bank compliance).
  • Static code analysis and quality gates (SonarQube).
  • SBOM generation and dependency tracking.
  • Secret management (SOPS with AWS KMS).
• Develop and maintain Helm chart and GitOps deployment templates (Flux).
• Establish and enforce SDLC standards:
  • Branching strategies and merge request workflows.
  • Code review practices and approval gates.
  • Testing requirements and coverage thresholds.
• Collaborate with platform engineering to translate infrastructure requirements into developer-friendly patterns.
• Support teams in containerization, Kubernetes deployments, and service mesh integration (Istio).
• Improve developer onboarding experience through documentation, automation, and self-service tooling.
• Assist with modernization of legacy applications into containerized workloads.
• Support incident response, deployment troubleshooting, and Flux reconciliation issues.
• Administer enterprise AI tooling usage and governance.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and technical briefings.

Salary Range

$150,000 - $200,000

General Description Of Benefits

Required Skills

• U.S. Citizenship required.
• 5+ years of software development or DevOps experience.
• Demonstrated experience engaging directly with development teams to gather requirements and drive adoption of tools or processes.
• Ability to synthesize competing priorities from multiple teams into a coherent backlog.
• Experience administering or championing developer experience platforms (Coder, Gitpod, GitHub Codespaces, JetBrains Space, or similar cloud-based development environments).
• Strong experience with:
  • GitLab CI/CD or similar pipeline platforms.
  • Docker and container image best practices.
  • Kubernetes (Helm, deployments, services, RBAC).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
• Knowledge of DevSecOps practices and security scanning tools.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.
• Strong scripting skills (Bash, Python, or similar).
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and ability to work across organizational boundaries.

Desired Skills

• Experience in a product owner, technical lead, or enablement role where you owned intake and prioritization for an internal platform.
• Hands-on experience operating Coder (coder.com) at scale — template authoring, workspace lifecycle management, OIDC integration.
• Experience building internal developer portals (Backstage, Port, or similar).
• Experience with GitOps tooling (Flux or ArgoCD).
• Familiarity with AWS services (EKS, IAM, VPC, KMS, Route 53).
• Experience with Platform One Big Bang or DoD hardened Kubernetes distributions.
• Familiarity with service mesh (Istio), policy engines (Kyverno), or identity providers (Keycloak).
• Exposure to AI/ML tooling integration in SDLC workflows.
• Knowledge of compliance frameworks (NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, CMMC).

#ECS1

ECS is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate or allow discrimination on the basis any characteristic protected by law. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, or local jurisdiction law.

ECS is a leading mid-sized provider of technology services to the United States Federal Government. We are focused on people, values and purpose. Every day, our 3200+ employees focus on providing their technical talent to support the Federal Agencies and Departments of the US Government to serve, protect and defend the American People.