Senior Principal Platform Engineer

Clarity Innovations•Columbia, MD

About The Position

Clarity Innovations is hiring a Senior Principal Platform Engineer to build and operate the on-premises Kubernetes platform used across the company. The role is split between owning the in-house cluster provisioning tool as a software product and operating the clusters, storage, networking, and hardware that support it. The engineer will work in Rapid Capabilities, Clarity’s product development organization, alongside lean Extreme Programming teams, pairing with engineers and delivering small, tested increments. The position includes developing and maintaining an automated, reproducible cluster provisioning solution; operating on-premises Kubernetes and its critical components; managing bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure across data centers and cloud environments; implementing observability; and embedding security and compliance into the platform. The engineer will also participate in team planning, stand-ups, retrospectives, and daily pairing. The anticipated base salary range is $133,500–$227,000. The final offer may vary based on location, contract requirements, experience, skills, education, certifications, and role scope. Clarity offers a Total Rewards package that includes performance-based bonuses, medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) plan with company match, paid time off and holidays, flexible work arrangements where possible, and income protection benefits.

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain the in-house automated cluster provisioning solution to make clusters reproducible and consistent.
Design provisioning-tool features, write tests, manage releases and versioning, and maintain user documentation.
Gather internal team requirements and turn them into a roadmap for the provisioning platform.
Refactor and modernize the provisioning tool 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, ingress, and internal registry components.
Build safe multi-tenancy using namespaces, RBAC, resource quotas, network policies, and fair-share scheduling.
Plan, run, and regularly test backups and disaster recovery, and perform etcd maintenance.
Manage bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure, coordinating hardware provisioning and replacement with data center and IT teams.
Design and maintain infrastructure across on-premises data centers and AWS or Azure, using infrastructure-as-code where possible.
Implement metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting observability.
Embed security and compliance practices into the platform, including secrets management, IAM, policy-as-code, and supply chain security.
Patch operating systems and cluster components on a regular cadence to meet security and compliance requirements.
Participate in XP team planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, and pair with engineers on implementation daily.