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Staff Build Engineer

Remote

Staff Build Engineer

Location: U.S. (Remote)
Eligibility: U.S. Citizenship required (federal programs & contracts)

About RapidFort

RapidFort builds hardened, production-ready container images and automation that help enterprises and U.S. government agencies reduce software supply chain risk and deploy secure workloads faster.

We go beyond vulnerability scanning. Our platform is remediation-first, focused on runtime hardening, minimal attack surface, and operational simplicity for cloud-native and Kubernetes environments. Our customers run mission-critical workloads — including regulated and DoD-adjacent environments — and they depend on us to get this right every day.

The Role

We’re hiring a Staff Build Engineer — a deeply experienced, hands-on engineer who thrives close to the metal and takes full ownership of systems that must work.

This role sits at the core of RapidFort’s product. You will own the build pipelines, hardened container image catalog, and automation systems that power everything we ship. You’ll be the engineer teams rely on when builds fail, scale introduces friction, or reliability matters more than speed.

This is not a passive DevOps role. It’s for someone who:

  • Knows Linux and containers inside and out

  • Is calm, decisive, and effective in high-impact operational environments

  • Thinks in terms of reliability, repeatability, and scale

  • Improves systems steadily rather than chasing shiny tools

You will act as both operator and senior technical owner, keeping today’s builds rock-solid while evolving the platform as RapidFort grows.

What You’ll Do

  • Own and execute daily builds and publish a trusted, up-to-date catalog of RapidFort’s curated container images

  • Maintain, monitor, and continuously improve the entire build environment, including Docker builds, image tooling, automation, and supporting infrastructure

  • Triage and debug build failures, container issues, and image-related problems across engineering teams

  • Write and maintain automation and internal tooling in Python and Bash

  • Partner closely with application and platform engineers to improve build workflows, reduce friction, and increase reliability

  • Drive CI/CD stability, performance, and consistency across environments

  • Scale build infrastructure to support increasing image volume, customers, and engineering velocity

  • Identify and eliminate manual or error-prone processes through automation

  • Document critical workflows and operational runbooks

  • Serve as a senior technical voice on build systems, container tooling, image hardening, and supply chain integrity

Minimum Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in Build Engineering, DevOps, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering

  • U.S. Citizenship required pursuant to federal contract and security requirements

  • Deep Linux expertise and strong command-line fluency

  • Strong Python and Bash scripting experience

  • Advanced experience with Docker and container build systems, including debugging complex image issues

  • Proven experience operating and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines in production environments

  • Hands-on experience maintaining and customizing Jenkins pipelines

  • Solid working knowledge of Kubernetes, sufficient to diagnose image, deployment, and runtime issues

  • Experience troubleshooting distributed systems and remote build environments

  • Strong familiarity with Git-based workflows (GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket)

  • Experience improving build reliability, performance, and throughput at scale

  • Experience with AWS and/or Azure cloud environments

  • Familiarity with container security, image scanning, or software supply chain tooling

  • Experience with observability tools and build metrics

  • Experience working in early-stage startups or fast-scaling engineering environments

  • Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar)

  • Exposure to regulated, government, or security-sensitive environments

  • Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering teams

  • Demonstrated ownership mindset and comfort owning routine operational responsibilities

Compensation & Benefits

  • Base Salary Range: $120,000 – $200,000 USD, depending on experience and impact

  • Equity: Meaningful equity participation

  • Benefits: Competitive health, dental, vision, and paid time off

What Success Looks Like in Your First 90 Days

  • You’ve taken full ownership of the daily build and image publishing process

  • Build reliability is consistently 95%+, with faster detection and resolution of failures

  • You’ve automated 3–5 manual or repetitive workflows

  • Engineering teams trust you as the go-to expert for build and container issues

  • You’ve documented 2–3 critical operational processes

  • You’ve proposed and started implementing 1–2 meaningful infrastructure improvements to support scale and reliability

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