Production Operations Engineer
Akumen, Inc
Reston, Virginia, United States
Position Title: Production Operations Engineer
As a Production Operations Engineer (API Platform), you will support the day-to-day operations, monitoring, maintenance, and continuous improvement of enterprise API gateway platforms supporting mission-critical federal systems. This role requires a proactive operations professional with experience supporting highly available production environments, incident response, and platform reliability.
The successful candidate will work closely with infrastructure engineers, platform engineers, software developers, cybersecurity teams, and service management personnel to ensure secure, stable, and high-performing API platform operations. This position plays a key role in maintaining operational excellence through monitoring, troubleshooting, change management, and continuous service improvement.
Responsibilities
- Monitor and maintain enterprise API gateway platforms across development, testing, and production environments.
- Respond to production incidents, service requests, and operational alerts while ensuring timely issue resolution.
- Troubleshoot platform performance, API routing, authentication, authorization, connectivity, and availability issues.
- Support production releases, change management activities, system validation, and operational readiness reviews.
- Perform routine platform maintenance including certificate updates, patch management, vulnerability remediation, and configuration changes.
- Monitor application health, system performance, logging, telemetry, and operational dashboards using enterprise monitoring tools.
- Document incidents, root cause analyses (RCA), operational procedures, and knowledge articles within ServiceNow and other documentation repositories.
- Collaborate with development, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and DevSecOps teams to improve platform reliability and operational efficiency.
- Support disaster recovery planning, backup validation, and business continuity testing.
- Ensure production environments comply with organizational security policies, federal requirements, and operational best practices.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience).
- Five (5) or more years of experience supporting enterprise production operations, application support, middleware, or API platform environments.
- Experience supporting enterprise monitoring, incident response, operational troubleshooting, and production support processes.
- Experience using IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms such as ServiceNow for incident, change, and problem management.
- Experience supporting enterprise API platforms, middleware, cloud services, or distributed application environments.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, written, and verbal communication skills.
Desired Qualifications
- Experience supporting Kong, IBM webMethods, Azure API Management, Apigee, MuleSoft, AWS API Gateway, or similar API gateway platforms.
- Experience with observability platforms such as AppDynamics, ELK Stack, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience supporting Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, or cloud-native infrastructure.
- Familiarity with DevSecOps, CI/CD pipelines, and release management processes.
- Experience supporting Department of State, DoD, or other Federal Civilian agencies.
- Active Secret security clearance preferred.
Clearance Requirement
- Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain a federal security clearance.
Akumen, Inc. is an equal employment opportunity employer. All employment decisions are made based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, and without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We are committed to a respectful and inclusive workplace where all individuals have the opportunity to succeed. Akumen, Inc. maintains a drug-free workplace consistent with applicable local, state, and federal laws.
Equal employment opportunity, including veterans and individuals with disabilities.
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