Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer, Federal

About this role

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About Trase
Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig, Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings.Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security.
About the Role
As a Senior or Staff DevOps Engineer at Trase, you will build, deploy, and operate the infrastructure supporting Red Cell Federal and Red Cell Partners’ incubations and portfolio companies. You will join Trase's dedicated RCF/RCP support team, with a strong focus on federal, government, and national security programs.
Red Cell Partners is an investment and incubation firm that builds and supports technology companies, including Trase. Red Cell Federal is our federal-focused partner within that ecosystem. This role helps RCF and other RCP partner companies adopt and operate Trase OS in their own environments.
This is a hands-on engineering role spanning partner onboarding, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, secure releases, observability, and production support. You will work directly with partner engineers, Trase's dedicated software engineers and TPM, Platform Engineering, and GRC to turn requirements into validated deployments and dependable operations.
The level will reflect the candidate's experience and demonstrated scope. Senior engineers will independently deliver and support complex partner deployments. Staff engineers will also lead architecture across partner environments, establish reusable standards, and mentor engineers.
Why this Role is Needed
RCF and RCP companies need secure, repeatable deployments across commercial and government cloud, private networks, and on-premises infrastructure. Their requirements span installation, integrations, hardening, upgrades, incident response, and ongoing vulnerability remediation.
This role provides dedicated engineering ownership from environment readiness through sustained operations. You will make deployments easier to install, validate, upgrade, and support, while turning recurring partner needs into reusable capabilities with Trase's platform team.
What You'll Do

• Build and operate RCF/RCP partner environments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and customer-controlled or on-premises infrastructure, adapting to each program's access, networking, and security requirements.

• Package and validate Trase OS services and dependencies using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and approved registries. Maintain complete, versioned image inventories, release manifests, and image digests so partner deliveries contain the required artifacts.

• Create reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, cluster bootstrap automation, and CI/CD or GitOps workflows using Terraform, Pulumi, Argo CD, or comparable tools.

• Prepare and validate networking, IAM, secrets, certificates, storage, registries, and model-provider connectivity. Support restricted-network and disconnected deployment patterns where required, in partnership with application engineers.

• Remove or abstract cloud-specific dependencies that block partner deployments. Validate representative agent workflows end to end, including service integrations, authentication, model access, and persistent state.

• Own technical triage and troubleshooting for partner deployment and production issues across application services, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and networks. Coordinate fixes and escalations with named owners and verify resolution with partners.

• Deliver tested releases, patches, and upgrades with automated validation gates, version compatibility checks, smoke tests, rollback procedures, and clear release notes. Confirm the deployed artifacts match the approved release.

• Operate metrics, logs, traces, audit logging, dashboards, alerts, and SLOs for partner environments. Support incident response, recovery, capacity planning, and reliability improvements.

• Partner with GRC and RCF security teams on container hardening, vulnerability scanning, CVE remediation, SBOMs, and engineering evidence for applicable STIG, RMF/ATO, and impact-level requirements. Verify fixes through rescanning and deployment validation; coordinate exceptions and approvals with security owners.

• Support sustainment of federal deployments, including Second Front where applicable, through patching, image updates, configuration changes, and ongoing security remediation within agreed Trase/partner responsibilities.

• Maintain deployment guides, environment inventories, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting documentation. Provide partner onboarding, knowledge transfer, and operational handoffs with clear prerequisites, access boundaries, and support ownership.

Technical leadership

• Lead infrastructure and reliability decisions across RCF/RCP engagements, keeping partner-specific requirements aligned with Trase's shared architecture.

• Set practical standards for secure releases, production readiness, observability, and support handoffs across partner environments.

• Work with…