Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

CLEAR - Corporate•New York, NY

5h•$215,000 - $260,000•Onsite

About The Position

CLEAR is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on its Cloud Infrastructure team to set the technical direction for the cloud platform underpinning its systems. The role spans AWS networking, Kubernetes, staging environments, and infrastructure for AI workloads. It will establish durable, cross-team patterns and standards that help engineers build, ship, and operate reliable software more quickly and safely. The position leads cloud-platform architecture and cross-functional initiatives from design through rollout and adoption. It also acts as a product owner for the platform, identifying engineering pain points and developing self-service capabilities. The engineer will mentor colleagues, lead design and incident reviews, and turn operational lessons into lasting improvements. Success is measured through infrastructure reliability and SLO attainment, fewer infrastructure-caused incidents, faster environment provisioning, adoption of staging and self-service tools, reduced operational toil, cloud cost efficiency, and adoption of infrastructure standards. The role offers a base salary range of $215,000–$260,000, with compensation depending on factors including location, education, skills, experience, and performance. Total compensation may also include annual bonuses, commission, and Restricted Stock Units.

Requirements

Deep AWS expertise, including VPC design, routing, Security Groups, load balancing, Route53, and IAM.
Experience designing multi-account, multi-environment platforms.
Experience designing and building production software systems such as services, APIs, and internal developer tools in Python, Java, or a similar language.
Strong fundamentals in system design, testing, and maintainable code.
Experience running and evolving production EKS clusters, including cluster networking, ingress, service mesh, and cluster lifecycle management.
Experience writing production-grade software in Python or another modern language and building reusable, well-tested Pulumi or equivalent Infrastructure as Code modules.
Experience designing for failure, implementing safe rollouts, leading incident response, and instrumenting systems with observability tools.
Ability to drive consensus across teams through RFCs and design reviews, communicate trade-offs clearly, and mentor engineers.

Nice To Haves

Experience with edge and network security tooling such as Cloudflare or Palo Alto.
Experience with Istio service mesh.
Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation.

Responsibilities

Drive the technical direction and long-term architecture of CLEAR’s cloud platform across AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), networking, and Infrastructure as Code, balancing reliability, security, cost, and simplicity.
Lead cross-functional initiatives end to end, including production-like staging environments and infrastructure for AI workloads, from RFC and design through rollout and adoption.
Define and evolve infrastructure engineering standards, including IaC patterns, safe rollout and rollback, observability, and network and security baselines.
Gather feedback from engineering teams, identify systemic pain points, and build self-service platform capabilities that reduce toil.
Mentor engineers, lead design and incident reviews, and translate lessons learned into lasting system improvements.
Improve platform reliability, developer velocity, operational efficiency, cloud cost efficiency, and adoption of Cloud Infrastructure standards and patterns.