Platform Engineer

NALEJ•Arlington, VA

About The Position

NALEJ is hiring a Platform Engineer to build and operate NALEJ OS, an AI-native, enterprise open-source developer platform covering development, deployment, and day-2 operations across cloud and edge. The platform supports defense and commercial customers through SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, hybrid, and air-gapped deployments, with security and compliance capabilities for standards including IL4–IL6, SAP, MOSA, NIST, and Zero Trust. The platform team owns a production, multi-cluster Kubernetes platform serving multiple customer tenants, including cloud infrastructure, clusters, service mesh, GitOps delivery, and tenant-facing web applications. This is a generalist role spanning infrastructure, Kubernetes operations, software delivery, networking, security, identity, observability, and AI operations. Engineers use AI agents in their daily work, develop agent workflows, and may ship product AI features. The role offers ownership of platform initiatives from design through delivery, including coordination with product, application, and test engineers. The position is located in Ballston, Virginia. U.S. citizenship is required, and the role may require the ability to obtain a Secret clearance.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience in platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE work.
Experience with infrastructure as code using tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane, or CloudFormation.
Hands-on experience deploying, operating, and debugging containers and Kubernetes workloads in production.
Experience with at least one major cloud provider, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Experience with CI/CD and understanding of GitOps or other declarative delivery models.
Solid networking fundamentals, including DNS, TLS, load balancing, and service traffic flows.
Working knowledge of modern identity and authentication, including OIDC, OAuth 2.0, and JWTs.
Programming skills in at least one modern language and willingness to learn others; the team primarily uses Go, Python, and TypeScript.
Enthusiasm for AI-assisted development and willingness to try new tools.
Strong drive and a self-starter mindset, including the ability to identify problems and follow through.
Clear written communication and ability to explain design decisions and tradeoffs.
U.S. citizenship.
Ability to obtain a Secret clearance may be required.

Nice To Haves

Experience running multi-cluster or multi-tenant Kubernetes in production.
Experience with a service mesh such as Istio, Linkerd, or Cilium.
Experience with policy as code and Kubernetes security tools such as Kyverno, OPA Gatekeeper, or Falco.
Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry.
Experience with progressive delivery, such as canary or blue-green releases with automated analysis.
Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments, such as defense, healthcare, or critical infrastructure, or with compliance frameworks such as NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, or DoD Impact Levels.
Experience building with LLMs, such as agent workflows, MCP servers, AI developer tooling, or AI product features.
Cloud or Kubernetes certifications, such as AWS Solutions Architect, CKA, or CKS.
A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate cloud infrastructure as code across multiple accounts and environments.
Operate production multi-cluster Kubernetes, including cluster and node lifecycle, upgrades, access control, admission policy, and custom resources.
Automate end-to-end environment creation to minimize human involvement in setting up customer environments.
Own delivery from commit to production, including CI pipelines, image builds, rendered configuration, and GitOps synchronization.
Build safe promotion between environments, including progressive delivery with metrics-driven automated rollback.
Build AI-driven workflows to automate release and promotion work currently done manually by engineers.
Operate the service mesh, including cross-cluster routing, mutual TLS, and tenant traffic isolation.
Build zero-trust controls into the platform, including policy enforcement, certificate management, workload identity, secrets management, and runtime threat detection.
Maintain the authentication chain protecting platform and tenant applications, from the identity provider through the authentication proxy.
Maintain metrics, logs, and alerting across clusters.
Build agents that interpret operational signals, triage problems, and propose fixes.
Design and roll out AI agents, skills, and workflows that shape how the team works.
Help ship AI features into the product.
Build and improve internal tools that make the team more effective.
Lead platform initiatives from design to delivery, managing scope, dependencies, and timelines and collaborating early with product, application, and test engineers.