Sr Principal DevOps Engineer (AHT)

RELOCATION ASSISTANCE: Relocation assistance may be available CLEARANCE REQUIRED FOR START: Yes CLEARANCE TYPE: Top Secret TRAVEL: Yes, 10% of the Time Description At Northrop Grumman, our employees have incredible opportunities to work on revolutionary systems that impact people's lives around the world today, and for generations to come. Our pioneering and inventive spirit has enabled us to be at the forefront of many technological advancements in our nation's history - from the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, to stealth bombers, to landing on the moon. We look for people who have bold new ideas, courage and a pioneering spirit to join forces to invent the future, and have fun along the way. Our culture thrives on intellectual curiosity, cognitive diversity and bringing your whole self to work — and we have an insatiable drive to do what others think is impossible. Our employees are not only part of history, they're making history. Northrop Grumman’s Space Sector is seeking a Sr Principal DevOps Engineer to join our team in Aurora, CO or Fairfax, VA to support on-premises mission systems by operating, maintaining, and incrementally enhancing existing DevOps and platform solutions. The engineer will work within established architectures and standards rather than designing new solutions, focusing on reliability, security, and continuous improvement of current environments. In this job, you will: Operate and maintain existing GitLab CI/CD infrastructure including patching and permissions. Advise on updates to jobs, runners, variables, and approvals to improve stability and throughput. Administer Nexus artifact repositories including patching, backups, access management, repository configuration, cleanup/retention policies, and routine health checks. Maintain Apache NiFi infrastructure including patching, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and implementing changes defined by senior engineers. Support installation and day-to-day operations of Kubernetes on-prem clusters, including patching, storage management, deployments, rollouts/rollbacks, configuration updates, and resource adjustments. Maintain and extend monitoring and alerting using Grafana and Prometheus for on-prem infrastructure and applications, including patching, access control, refining dashboards, alert rules, and service onboarding within existing observability patterns. Implement incremental improvements to existing DevOps tooling and workflows (e.g., adding tests, improving pipeline stages, automating manual steps) consistent with established designs and security baselines. Perform routine incident response and problem resolution for build, deployment, and runtime issues across CI/CD, Kubernetes, Nexus, NiFi, and supporting services. Apply existing security and compliance controls across the DevOps toolchain: secrets management, access controls, certificate and credential rotation, image scanning, and log retention in accordance with program requirements. Follow formal change management processes, including documenting changes, participating in reviews, and updating runbooks, SOPs, and technical documentation. Collaborate with senior engineers, system administrators, and developers to implement improvements and operational changes defined by leads and architects. Other duties as assigned Basic Qualifications : Bachelor’s in STEM degree with 8 years of professional experience; Master’s in STEM degree with 6 years of professional experience; PhD with 3 years of experience.  4 or more years of experience in lieu of degree. United States Citizenship is required. Must have an active U.S. Government Top Secret security clearance at time of application, current and within scope, with the ability to obtain and maintain SCI approval/access. Must have the ability to obtain and maintain U.S. Government Full Scope Polygraph. Relevant DevOps, site reliability, or systems engineering experience. Demonstrated experience maintaining GitLab CI/CD in an