Platform Engineer

Job Description

Platform Engineer

Location : Northern Virvinia -

MUST HAVE - TS / SCI

If you enjoy working with new technologies, enterprise-leading equipment, and seek to design, deploy, and maintain development pipelines, our client would like to speak to you. This position will play a key critical role in building, maintaining, and optimizing the underlying infrastructure to support Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads.

You will join a diverse team of platform engineers to design, deploy, maintain, and secure platform infrastructure. You will collaborate with people inside and outside the organization to deliver the highest standards for building, deploying, and securing infrastructure.

Core Competencies - Technical

• Cluster Management : Extensive experience designing, deploying, securing, maintaining, and upgrading highly available, scalable Kubernetes clusters (e.g., EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, or self-managed). This includes understanding control plane components, worker nodes, and their interactions.
• Containerization & Orchestration : Proficient with Docker and containerization best practices, along with advanced knowledge of Kubernetes primitives like Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Persistent Volumes, and Namespaces.
• Networking : Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking concepts (CNI plugins like Calico or Cilium), network policies, service meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), and DNS within and outside the cluster.
• Security : Expertise in securing Kubernetes environments, including RBAC, Pod Security Policies / Admission Controllers, vulnerability scanning, secret management (e.g., Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and network security.
• Performance & Optimization : Ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues within Kubernetes, optimize resource utilization, and implement best practices for cluster tuning.
• Troubleshooting : Advanced troubleshooting skills for identifying and resolving issues across the entire Kubernetes stack, from infrastructure to application-level problems.
• CI / CD Tooling : Hands-on experience with popular CI / CD platforms like Jenkins, GitLab CI / CD, GitHub Actions, Tekton, Argo Workflows, or similar.
• Pipeline Design & Implementation : Ability to design, implement, and maintain robust, automated CI / CD pipelines for deploying containerized applications to Kubernetes, adhering to best practices like GitOps.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) : Proficiency with IaC tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation for provisioning and managing infrastructure declaratively. Experience with Helm charts and Kustomize for Kubernetes application packaging and deployment.
• Automation Scripting : Strong scripting skills in languages like Python, Go, Bash, or similar, for automating tasks, creating custom tooling, and integrating various systems.
• GitOps Methodologies : Practical experience with GitOps workflows and tools like Argo CD for automated deployments and continuous delivery.
• Monitoring & Alerting : Experience implementing and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions for Kubernetes clusters and applications (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack / OpenSearch, Datadog, Splunk).
• Logging & Tracing : Familiarity with centralized logging solutions and distributed tracing for effective debugging and performance analysis.
• DevOps & SRE Principles : Deep understanding of DevOps culture, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, and "you build it, you run it" philosophy.
• Version Control : Expert in Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Testing : Understanding of various testing methodologies (unit, integration, end-to-end) within the context of platform and pipeline development.
• Linux / Unix : Strong background in Linux system administration, including networking, file systems, process management, and troubleshooting.
• Networking Concepts : Solid understanding of core networking protocols (TCP / IP, DNS, HTTP, Load Balancing).

Core Competencies – Leadership

Additional Skills & Requirements

Clearance Requirements