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Salary: USD 148,750 - 201,250 / annual
Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join their team. The company delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery for defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government, with a focus on secure, cloud-native solutions for continuous software integration and delivery.
In this role, you will serve as a bridge between application development teams and production environments, advocating best practices and facilitating communication across teams. You will help automate and build runtime production environments, working with various technical baselines depending on specific engagements. Your responsibilities include:
- Validating solutions and implementations to ensure alignment with business requirements and maintaining platform integrity
- Independently identifying and solving business problems, developing components to address specific challenges
- Understanding how medium-level tasks contribute to overall goals and collaborating with cross-functional teams
- Providing accurate time and effort estimates for medium-sized tasks to support project planning
- Demonstrating proficiency with at least one programming language and understanding when to use programming languages versus shell scripting
- Owning the bridge between application development and production environments
The role involves 10-25% travel expectations. You will work on Kubernetes, cloud environments (AWS/GCP/Azure), infrastructure-as-code, continuous delivery automation, GitOps, containers, CNCF projects, Helm/Kustomize, and security delivery improvements.
IMPORTANT: This position requires U.S. citizenship and is with a contractor for the U.S. government.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Preferred experience includes:
- Proven experience as a Platform Engineer or similar role with focus on system architecture and development
- Demonstrated experience with cloud-native technologies: Kubernetes, Google Cloud, Docker
- Familiarity with continuous delivery, distributed architectures, infrastructure-as-code, containerization, and cloud services
- Proficiency in at least one programming language (Python, Go, Ansible) and basic shell scripting
- Proficiency with YAML
- Experience working on Agile teams in remote environments
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Experience with security automation: API Security, Container Security, Cloud Security
- Familiarity with architecture security design, monitoring, and performance instrumentation in complex enterprise environments
- Comfort with debugging systems and reading/writing code
- Hold or be eligible for Top Secret/SCI security clearance
- DoD 8570 IAT II certification
- Experience with Department of Defense work, specifically production Authority to Operate (ATO'd) systems
- Knowledge of DevSecOps/DevOps and CI/CD theory
