Sr. Principal Mission Engineer
About The Position
Clarity Innovations is seeking a cleared Senior Principal Mission Engineer to join a team of software and platform engineers building a unified, multi-tenant control plane. This platform abstracts infrastructure differences across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, allowing application teams to dynamically provision secure, isolated Kubernetes clusters and workloads. The control plane utilizes Crossplane and Cluster API (CAPI). As the primary on-site engineer, you will be responsible for deploying, managing, updating, and optimizing platform environments within a classified cloud (e.g., AWS Top Secret Region). Your role will involve ensuring the seamless operation of cloud capabilities, Kubernetes clusters, and API gateway architectures, handling localized cloud infrastructure troubleshooting, deploying secure software updates, and providing direct technical consultation and training to mission users. You will act as a liaison between the remote engineering pipeline and the isolated, classified cloud infrastructure, managing everything from low-level troubleshooting to customer engagement and user training. The ideal candidate is highly independent and capable of driving projects from inception to completion with minimal supervision.
Requirements
- Active Top Secret / SCI clearance
- 5+ years of systems engineering experience
- At least 2-3 years specifically focused on architecture and operations within government or classified cloud regions (AWS GovCloud/Secret/Top Secret or Azure Government/Secret)
- Solid understanding of Kubernetes architecture, cluster operations, and debugging cloud-native application stacks
- Practical knowledge of cloud routing, secure API gateways, security groups, IAM roles/policies, and cross-domain solution paths
- Strong verbal and written communication skills
- Experience defending technical designs to government representatives
- Experience training technical end-users
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience managing incident response lifecycles and resolving critical control-plane or etcd failures within live, high-scale production systems
- Advanced capability in utilizing telemetry, API server audit logs, distributed tracing, and metrics to perform root-cause analysis and resolve complex issues in live production environments
Responsibilities
- Manage and monitor the platform’s cloud-native services, compute instances, virtual networks (VPCs/VNets), and identity policies inside the secure cloud enclave.
- Troubleshoot and maintain localized Kubernetes clusters (managed or CAPI-provisioned), ensuring proper integration with ingress API gateways, Cilium network fabrics, and local container registries.
- Coordinate and execute complex software and platform updates within air-gapped or restricted-connectivity cloud environments, ensuring minimal disruption to active mission sets.
- Rapidly isolate and resolve cloud-specific connectivity issues, routing failures, IAM permission deadlocks, and API rate-limiting blocks.
- Serve as the on-site cloud subject matter expert, guiding the customer through complex environment configurations and managing technical expectations.
- Provide hands-on training, workshops, and documentation to site application developers onboarding their workloads onto the cloud platform.
Benefits
- Equal opportunity employer
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
