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Defense Unicorns, a U.S. government contractor, is seeking a Platform Engineer to join its platform team—a combined DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering group responsible for developing, maintaining, and ensuring the reliability of a cloud-based platform environment.
You will work across infrastructure as code, automated deployments, identity and access management, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines. You'll serve as a bridge between application teams and the platform, advocating best practices and helping ensure the platform is reliable, secure, and scalable. You should be comfortable operating in ambiguity, contributing to documentation and standards where they exist, and building them where they don't.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build, maintain, and improve Kubernetes clusters and containerized application deployments across cloud environments (AWS, EKS, RKE2)
- Develop and manage infrastructure as code to provision and configure platform resources consistently and repeatably
- Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, including GitLab CI configuration, runner deployments, and automated build and deployment workflows
- Support identity and access management through tools such as Keycloak
- Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting, and logging to ensure platform health
- Manage certificate lifecycle operations and related automation
- Contribute to platform security posture through container security practices, Iron Bank image compliance, and support for ATO processes
- Collaborate with application teams to troubleshoot deployment issues and platform integration problems
- Write and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, architecture decision records (ADRs), and operational standards
- Participate in on-call rotations and support platform incidents in a tier 2 role
- Mentor and support junior engineers through pairing, code reviews, and knowledge sharing
Minimum qualifications include hands-on experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD tooling (GitLab CI), Linux/Unix administration, AWS cloud platforms, containerization (Docker), and YAML fluency. Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently in a remote environment are essential. U.S. citizenship is required; must be eligible for CUI access and possess or be able to obtain a DoD 8570 IAT II certification (e.g., Security+ CE).
Preferred experience includes security clearance eligibility, UDS Core and Iron Bank familiarity, Keycloak or similar IAM platforms, monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), programming proficiency (Go, Python, Bash), DevSecOps experience, GitOps workflows (Flux, ArgoCD), DoD production ATO system experience, and AWS certifications.
