Senior Principal Platform Engineer

Clarity Innovations•Columbia, MD

8d•$133,500 - $227,000

About The Position

Clarity Innovations is hiring a Senior Principal Platform Engineer to build and operate the on-premises Kubernetes platform used by teams across the company. The role combines software product ownership of an in-house cluster provisioning tool with operational responsibility for clusters, storage, networking, and underlying hardware. The engineer will develop the provisioning tool as a product, making clusters reproducible and consistent, while also maintaining the health and lifecycle of the platform. The position is part of Rapid Capabilities, Clarity Innovations’ product development organization, which includes the Aurora Enterprise and Manifest product suites. Teams work in an Extreme Programming (XP) environment, pairing with engineers and delivering small, tested increments. The engineer will participate in team planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives and pair with engineers daily. The role also involves managing bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure, supporting infrastructure across on-premises data centers and AWS or Azure, implementing observability, and embedding security and compliance into the platform. The salary range is $133,500–$227,000; actual compensation may vary based on location, contract requirements, experience, skills, education, certifications, and role scope.

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain the in-house automated cluster provisioning solution so clusters are reproducible and consistent.
Design features, write tests, manage releases and versioning, and maintain clear documentation for provisioning-tool users.
Gather requirements from internal teams and translate them into a roadmap for the provisioning platform.
Refactor and modernize the existing codebase while reducing technical debt and keeping clusters stable.
Integrate the provisioning tool with CI/CD, observability, secrets management, and access control.
Build internal tools, services, APIs, and CLIs in Go to automate deployment and operations.
Deploy, maintain, and upgrade on-premises Kubernetes clusters, including capacity planning, version upgrades, and lifecycle management.
Operate cluster-critical storage, networking, and internal registry components.
Build multi-tenancy so teams can share clusters safely, using namespaces, RBAC, resource quotas, network policies, and fair-share scheduling.
Plan, run, and regularly test backups, disaster recovery, and etcd maintenance.
Manage bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure, coordinating with data center and IT teams on hardware provisioning and replacement.
Design and maintain infrastructure across on-premises data centers and AWS or Azure, using infrastructure-as-code wherever possible.
Implement observability for metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting.
Embed security and compliance into the platform, including secrets management, IAM, policy-as-code, and supply chain security.
Patch operating systems and cluster components regularly to meet security and compliance requirements.
Participate in XP team planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, and pair with engineers on implementation daily.