Platform Engineer - FedD180/FedD181

Defense Unicorns

86d•$123,250 - $166,750•Remote

About The Position

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Platform Engineer to join its platform team, a combined DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering team responsible for developing, maintaining, and ensuring the reliability of a cloud-based platform environment. The role involves working across infrastructure as code, automated deployments, identity and access management, monitoring, and CI/CD pipelines. The engineer will connect application teams with the platform and help ensure it is reliable, secure, and scalable. The position requires comfort operating amid ambiguity and contributing to or establishing documentation and standards. The role includes a tier 2 on-call rotation and 5–10% travel. An active Secret clearance is required to apply and to start.

Requirements

Active Secret clearance to start; the posting also states an active Secret clearance is required to apply.
Hands-on experience deploying, managing, and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters and workloads.
Experience with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar.
Proficiency with CI/CD tooling, particularly GitLab CI or equivalent pipeline platforms.
Working knowledge of Linux/Unix operating systems and command-line administration.
Experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS, including EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, and VPC.
Familiarity with containerization, including Docker, container image builds, and registry management.
Ability to read and write YAML fluently for Kubernetes manifests, CRDs, Helm charts, and pipeline configurations.
Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently in a remote, asynchronous environment.
Possess or be able to obtain a DoD 8570 IAT II certification, such as Security+ CE.

Nice To Haves

Experience with UDS Core, Iron Bank, and/or Continuous Authority to Operate (C-ATO) processes.
Familiarity with identity and access management platforms such as Keycloak or similar.
Experience with monitoring and observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or similar.
Proficiency in one or more programming languages, such as Go, Python, or Bash scripting.
Experience working in a DevSecOps model with secure coding practices and vulnerability remediation.
Familiarity with GitOps workflows and tools such as Flux or ArgoCD.
Department of Defense experience, specifically working on a production ATO’d system.
Experience with distributed architectures and everything-as-code approaches.
AWS certifications related to platform or solutions architecture.
Experience writing architecture decision records, operational runbooks, or engineering standards.

Responsibilities

Build, maintain, and improve Kubernetes clusters and containerized application deployments across cloud environments, including AWS, EKS, and 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 using tools such as Keycloak, including user onboarding, role configuration, and troubleshooting.
Implement and maintain monitoring, alerting, and logging to ensure platform health and support incident investigation.
Manage certificate lifecycle operations, including renewal of public certificates and related automation.
Contribute to platform security through container security practices, Iron Bank image compliance, and support for ATO processes.
Collaborate with application teams to troubleshoot deployment issues, broken pipelines, and platform integration problems.
Write and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, architecture decision records, and operational standards.
Contribute to strategic planning that aligns technological advancements with mission objectives.
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.
Adapt to additional responsibilities as organizational needs evolve.