Lead Platform Engineer

Exiger • McLean, VA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Exiger is seeking a Lead Platform Engineer to serve as the technical lead for large, cross-cutting platform programs spanning multiple engineering teams and stakeholders. The role carries significant security, compliance, and reliability responsibility across commercial AWS and FedRAMP-authorized AWS GovCloud environments. It is an individual-contributor position with no direct reports, requiring leadership through technical judgment, clear communication, and collaboration, as well as deep AWS and Kubernetes expertise.

The engineer will lead platform programs from design through delivery, own architecture decisions across infrastructure and delivery, and reduce complexity in platform services and processes. The role includes designing enterprise infrastructure-as-code frameworks, multi-region CI/CD, developer guardrails, disaster-recovery and resilience strategies, and platform infrastructure for product, data, and AI/ML teams. The Lead Platform Engineer will communicate plans and risks across technical, security, compliance, federal-program, and business stakeholders; lead difficult incidents and improve incident response; establish platform quality standards; guide responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools; and mentor engineers across teams.

The position is listed as hybrid in the United States, with locations in McLean, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia; or New York City. U.S. citizenship is required for access to Exiger’s FedRAMP federal environments where legally required.

Requirements

• Track record as the technical lead on large, cross-team infrastructure or platform programs with many stakeholders.
• Advanced, production-proven expertise in AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, and CI/CD, including architecture decisions adopted by other teams.
• Strong architecture judgment across multiple aspects of a project, with the ability to explain reasoning and rejected alternatives.
• Concrete examples of reducing system or process complexity with measurable outcomes.
• Experience translating FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, and SOC 2 requirements into automated, enforceable controls with continuous evidence.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including design proposals, decision records, and incident reviews, and the ability to explain tradeoffs to engineers, auditors, and business leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to grow engineers through mentoring, coaching, and delegation.
• Strong Python or Go skills for platform tooling and automation.
• Typically 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years as a technical lead on cross-team programs; scope and judgment are considered alongside tenure.
• U.S. citizenship, required for access to Exiger’s FedRAMP federal environments where legally required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading or playing a central role in a FedRAMP authorization, continuous monitoring program, or SOC 2 Type II audit.
• Experience with AWS GovCloud, including partition isolation and service parity constraints.
• AWS Professional or Specialty certifications, CKA/CKS, or HashiCorp Terraform certification.
• Experience with internal developer platforms or developer portals such as Backstage or equivalent.
• Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd, and container supply chain security.
• Experience with HashiCorp Vault at scale.
• Experience with chaos engineering tools such as AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, or Litmus.
• Experience with FinOps and automated cost controls.
• Experience with infrastructure for data and AI/ML workloads, such as GPU scheduling on EKS, Amazon Bedrock, or SageMaker.

Responsibilities

• Lead large, cross-team platform programs, such as multi-region EKS, GovCloud expansion, or infrastructure-as-code framework re-architecture, from design through delivery.
• Make and own architecture decisions covering compute, network topology, identity, account structure, and delivery; document tradeoffs clearly.
• Reduce complexity across platform services and processes by consolidating patterns, retiring unnecessary components, and helping teams do more with less.
• Design enterprise infrastructure-as-code frameworks and multi-region CI/CD with approval gates, automated rollback, and policy enforcement.
• Architect guardrails and developer tooling that enable engineers to work safely in FedRAMP and GovCloud environments.
• Design disaster-recovery, capacity, and resilience strategies with explicit RTO/RPO targets, and validate them through sustained load, failure injection, and chaos testing.
• Partner with product, data, and AI/ML teams to design infrastructure suited to how they build and operate systems.
• Communicate plans, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, security, compliance, federal program teams, and business stakeholders; surface risks early and manage cross-team dependencies.
• Own on-call escalation paths, lead the most difficult incidents, and improve incident response across teams served by the platform.
• Set platform best practices and quality standards adopted by other teams, including infrastructure-as-code testing, policy tests, and failure testing in CI.
• Shape adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools on the platform team, defining validation standards and boundaries that respect federal compliance requirements.
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams, delegate meaningful work, and help raise the hiring bar for platform roles.

Benefits

• Discretionary Time Off for all employees, with no maximum limits on time off.
• Industry-leading health, vision, and dental benefits.
• Competitive compensation package.
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
• Flexible, hybrid approach to working from home and in the office where applicable.
• Wellness stipends and dedicated wellness programming.
• Career development programs with reimbursement for educational certifications.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed