Senior Platform Engineer

Defense Unicorns•Colorado Springs, CO

14d

About The Position

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join its Army team. The role focuses on building and operating product-aligned platform capabilities that support how software is developed, validated, and experienced. The engineer will create and own persistent, always-on environments and integration layers across the UDS platform, including Fleet Management, Edge Management, and system-level components. These environments will support internal dogfooding, UX validation, and customer demos, reducing reliance on ad-hoc local setups and enabling scalable, repeatable product experiences. The role addresses the time engineers currently spend setting up demos and managing product environments, which causes context switching and slows product delivery. It will establish reliable, self-service environments and tighter system integration so engineering teams can focus on product capabilities while improving product quality and usability. Working at the intersection of platform engineering and product development, the Senior Platform Engineer will help ensure systems can be continuously exercised, validated, and experienced in real-world conditions, and advocate for a strong customer experience as an integrator of the product portfolio. The position includes designing and operating always-on product environments for demos, internal use, and stakeholder access; building feature-branch and preview environments for UX feedback; enabling internal dogfooding through long-running deployments; integrating core system components; and supporting reliable, reproducible infrastructure and self-service demo and trial pathways. Travel expectations are 25%. The employer is a U.S. government contractor, and U.S. citizenship is required.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship is required.
Strong experience in platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure-focused software engineering.
Deep familiarity with Kubernetes and container-based systems.
Experience building and operating shared or multi-tenant environments.
Proficiency with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or Pulumi.
Strong understanding of CI/CD, GitOps, and deployment pipelines.
Experience integrating distributed systems across multiple services.
Comfort working across application, infrastructure, and networking system boundaries.
Proficiency with Linux/Unix systems.
Strong problem-solving skills and ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments.
Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and UX.
Ability to travel 25%.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain scalable platform environments for development, testing, and demos.
Own the reliability and usability of shared environments used across the team.
Collaborate with software engineers to integrate platform and product components.
Identify and close system integration gaps across services and infrastructure layers.
Build and maintain infrastructure as code for reproducible environments.
Improve developer experience by reducing friction in environment setup and usage.
Support product implementation and stakeholder access through stable, well-understood systems.
Contribute to platform and product architecture decisions related to environments and integration.
Design and operate always-on product environments for customer demos, internal use, and stakeholder access.
Build feature-branch and preview environments to support UX and rapid feedback loops.
Enable internal dogfooding through real, long-running deployments of UDS products.
Integrate core system components across Fleet Management, Edge Management, OS, and related services.
Reduce reliance on local environments by creating shared, reproducible infrastructure.
Support pathways toward self-service demo and trial environments.
Improve system reliability through continuous, real-world usage and validation.
Partner with engineering, product, and UX teams to ensure environments reflect real user scenarios.