Intermediate Platform Support Engineer
About The Position
MITRE Mission Computing is seeking a Platform Support Engineer to provide frontline support for Kubernetes and cloud platforms used by mission teams across MITRE’s Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. The role supports internal customers directly by triaging issues, following and authoring runbooks, troubleshooting customer problems, escalating when appropriate, and keeping platform teams unblocked. The engineer helps users apply platform tools correctly and securely and provides clear, timely support for compute environments used by internal tools and engineering, research, and mission workloads. The work takes place in a high-stakes environment with requirements that include CMMC compliance, high availability, and cyber resilience. The position supports engineering teams with varying levels of platform experience as they deliver solutions and AI-enabled capabilities for U.S. government sponsors. It is an operations-focused role requiring broad ownership and close communication with users and technical teams. The position requires at least three days per week onsite in McLean, Virginia; Bedford, Massachusetts; San Diego, California; or Colorado Springs, Colorado. The hired candidate must obtain a Secret U.S. government security clearance within one year of hire and must be a U.S. citizen to be eligible for clearance.
Requirements
- Typically, a bachelor’s degree and at least 2 years of related experience; an advanced degree with relevant experience, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience, may also qualify.
- At least 2 years supporting production applications and infrastructure in technical support, systems administration, or operations.
- Hands-on administrative experience with Linux and Windows, including troubleshooting logs, services, permissions, account lockouts, MFA, group membership, and login issues.
- Familiarity with AWS or a similar cloud environment, including instances, networking, IAM, and use of the console and CLI to investigate issues.
- Support-level exposure to containers and Kubernetes, including pods, deployments, logs, events, and common failure symptoms.
- Customer-facing ticket and chat skills, including reproducing issues, using runbooks, distinguishing application from platform problems, escalating clearly, and closing work with a useful resolution summary.
- Experience with service desk or work-management tools such as Jira, ServiceNow, or GitHub Issues, and meeting response and resolution expectations.
- Participation in incident response and on-call rotations, such as PagerDuty, including following escalation paths and documenting events.
- Ability to follow change-management and security procedures in regulated environments such as CMMC or SOC 2.
- Clear written and verbal communication with users, developers, and platform engineers.
- Ability to work in a small team with broad ownership and apply documentation and vendor guidance without step-by-step supervision.
- Experience working in a Kanban workflow, including pulling work from a shared board, limiting work in progress, and keeping ticket status current.
- Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S. government-issued security clearance within one year of hire; U.S. citizenship is required for clearance eligibility.
- Must work onsite at least 3 days per week in McLean, VA; Bedford, MA; San Diego, CA; or Colorado Springs, CO.
Nice To Haves
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field.
- CompTIA Security+ or CISSP certification.
- Hands-on use of monitoring and logging tools such as Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, or CloudTrail.
- Experience building and supporting CI/CD or Git workflows, including diagnosing pipeline failures, rerunning jobs, and verifying deployment status.
- Experience supporting and debugging production issues for Kubernetes users and platform tools, including collecting logs, events, and workload status.
- Experience authoring Infrastructure as Code, including Terraform that consumes existing modules and Ansible or similar tools using published collections.
- Familiarity with DNS, certificates, load balancers, remote access (VPN, bastion, SSH, RDP, WinRM), and connectivity checks such as ping, curl, and traceroute.
- Experience remediating platform CVEs in containers, EC2, or Lambda and guiding users through remediation of CVEs in their own workloads.
- Experience supporting disaster recovery activities, including following DR runbooks, performing backup and recovery, and confirming services return to a known-good state.
- Prior support work in government, DoD, or other regulated environments.
- Experience writing platform user guidance, SOPs, runbooks, knowledge-base articles, status updates, and post-mortems.
- Background or strong interest in platform, SRE, or cloud operations work.
- Active Secret Clearance.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the frontline support contact for users of MITRE’s Kubernetes and cloud platforms.
- Triage user and production issues, reproduce problems, distinguish application issues from platform issues, and resolve or escalate them.
- Follow and author runbooks and provide usable resolution summaries when closing support work.
- Guide platform users on using platform tools correctly and securely.
- Support compute environments used by internal tools and engineering, research, and mission workloads.
- Keep platform teams unblocked through clear and timely communication and escalation.
- Participate in incident response and on-call rotations, follow escalation paths, and document incident details.
- Follow change-management and security procedures in regulated environments.
- Work from a shared Kanban board, keep ticket status current, and make handoffs visible.
Benefits
- Competitive benefits.
- Meaningful career development.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
