Principal Platform Engineer - Connected Aviation (Remote)

RTX

22h•Remote

About The Position

The Aviation Intelligence (AI) team within Connected Aviation (CA) Engineering has end-to-end responsibility for managing Collins Aerospace and broader RTX data assets with integrity and quality. These assets are consumed by critical customer-facing applications via APIs, analytics, data visualizations, and data reporting. This role offers an opportunity to be a Senior Platform Engineer within a high-growth, high-visibility area of Collins Aerospace. As a Principal Platform Engineer on the Aviation Intelligence team, you will lead critical projects and coordination for the department, supporting Ascentia and FlightAware crews focused on AI/ML projects, data science, and data management.

Requirements

Typically requires a degree in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) and minimum 8 years prior relevant experience or an Advanced Degree in a related field and minimum 5 years of experience
Proficiency with Python.
Strong experience with AWS (EKS, IAM, VPCs, networking)
Hands-on Kubernetes experience operating production workloads
Experience managing Kafka (or Redpanda) in production environments
Proficiency with Terraform for infrastructure as code
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, GitHub Actions, or similar)
Solid understanding of distributed systems, reliability, and scaling
Experience supporting production data pipelines or ML systems
Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos, etc.)

Nice To Haves

Experience with Kafka Connect
Experience with Rust or a willingness to learn it.
Familiarity with Dagster, Airflow or other modern ETL orchestration tools
Background supporting ML/AI systems in production (MLOps)
Experience optimizing infrastructure for performance and cost
Familiarity with Iceberg, Spark, Elasticsearch and other large-scale data processing systems
Experience working in hybrid infrastructure environments (cloud + on-prem Kubernetes)

Responsibilities

Own and evolve AWS infrastructure supporting data platform, ML training, and analytics workloads (Iceberg/Trino, ETL pipelines, Kubeflow/MLflow)
Design, deploy, and maintain EKS-based services and Kubernetes workloads
Build and manage Terraform infrastructure across environments (dev/staging/prod)
Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployment (GitLab/GitHub)
Operate and improve Kafka/Redpanda clusters
Improve reliability, observability, and performance of prediction services
Support Dagster for data workflow orchestration
Collaborate with Data Science, ML Engineering, and Data Engineering to productionize models and data pipelines
Strengthen AWS IAM, networking, and connectivity between cloud and on-prem systems
Support cyber hardening efforts with our RTX cyber team
Identify and incrementally improve existing infrastructure and deployment patterns

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance
Three weeks of vacation for newly hired employees
Generous 401(k) plan that includes employer matching funds and separate employer retirement contribution, including a Lifetime Income Strategy option
Tuition reimbursement program
Student Loan Repayment Program
Life insurance and disability coverage
Optional coverages you can buy: pet insurance, home and auto insurance, additional life and accident insurance, critical illness insurance, group legal, ID theft protection
Birth, adoption, parental leave benefits
Ovia Health, fertility, and family planning
Adoption Assistance
Autism Benefit
Employee Assistance Plan, including up to 10 free counseling sessions
Healthy You Incentives, wellness rewards program
Doctor on Demand, virtual doctor visits
Bright Horizons, child and elder care services
Teladoc Medical Experts, second opinion program
Annual short-term and/or long-term incentive compensation programs