Senior AWS Platform Engineer

CertiPath Inc•Reston, VA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Want to energize your career? Looking for stability with the freedom to innovate? At CertiPath you can have both while making the world more secure and simplifying access processes. We are seeking an experienced Senior AWS Platform Engineer to lead the design, security, and scaling of our AWS EKS-based CI/CD platform and bootstrap our IVIP production cloud services. Join our team of engineers, make a difference, and crush your goals at CertiPath. We are the experts in software and services for high-assurance digital identity verification and management. We are an established organization with a 21-year track record of delivering on our promises with the drive and entrepreneurial spirit of a start-up. CertiPath is focused on bringing facility and network access management for commercial clients and government agencies into the 21st century.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain a government clearance.
At least a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
AWS CloudOps Engineer- Associate Certification.
8+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience or DevOps experience.
5+ years of expert-level AWS Kubernetes experience with EKS (Rancher-managed), EC2 (spot + reserved instances), VPC networking, IAM, Security Groups, Transit Gateway, and cost-optimized SaaS infrastructure on AWS.
Deep expertise building and operating production CI/CD platforms at scale, including on-call support and incident response.
Expert-level Kubernetes and CI/CD experience, including Actions Runner Controller (legacy + new gha-runner-scale-set), Helm, ephemeral runners, Docker-in-Docker, Kaniko, and GitHub Enterprise (ghe.com).
Strong IaC and automation skills with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes manifests, and GitOps workflows.
A strong security-first mindset with hands-on experience implementing cybersecurity best practices in SaaS and hybrid cloud environments.
Proven experience successfully working with CI/CD, container platforms, and workloads in AWS EKS (Nutanix NKP experience is a big plus).
Strong experience with Python for writing scripts and debugging.
Familiarity with Agentive Artificial Intelligence in Engineering
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; you can explain complex technical concepts to engineers and non-engineers.
A demonstrated ability to balance speed and quality; you ship fast without sacrificing long-term maintainability.

Nice To Haves

AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional certification.
Experience with Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), or Prism Central.
Familiarity with Harbor Registry (RBAC, robot accounts, garbage collection).
Experience with air-gapped or restricted network deployment.
Python or Go scripting for automation.
A background in FinTech or regulated SaaS environments.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, provisioning, and ongoing maintenance of production-grade AWS EKS clusters (Rancher-managed) using Infrastructure as Code.
Own the reliability, availability, performance, and security of production cloud services, including participation in an on-call rotation and off-hours incident response.
Architect, deploy, and scale Actions Runner Controller (both legacy and the new GitHub-supported gha-runner-scale-set) on AWS EKS with ephemeral runner pods, autoscaling, and GitHub App-based authentication.
Champion cybersecurity best practices across the entire platform, including least-privilege IAM, pod security policies, network policies, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and compliance controls.
Optimize container image building pipelines (Docker-in-Docker →Kaniko) and manage internal registries (Nexus, Harbor) to support our SaaS delivery platforms.
Write and maintain Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes manifests for EKS, networking, node pools, storage, and CI/CD components while driving GitOps practices.
Help design and manage hybrid networking between AWS EKS and on-prem Nutanix environments, including VLANs, routing, Load Balancer services, and secure egress to GitHub Enterprise and other SaaS services.
Instrument Prometheus/Grafana stacks, monitor runner pod lifecycle, build performance, and cluster resource utilization while implementing proactive scaling.