Sr Platform Engineer Lead

Description

The company is a consulting firm offering software development, digital transformation, human-centered design, data analytics and visualization, and cybersecurity services.

Its multidisciplinary teams work in agile fashion, delivering value in small increments alongside clients. For more than ten years, federal and commercial clients have relied on the company for complex, mission-critical work. It is listed in the Digital Services Coalition, a group of firms recognized for IT service delivery.

The company helps federal agencies modernize how they build software, producing secure, scalable, mission-driven systems. The Washington Post named it a Top Workplace in 2025 and 2026.

The team is seeking a Sr Platform Engineer Lead to guide the design, automation, and reliability of cloud platforms that run mission-critical federal systems. The role suits a senior engineer with strong DevOps and infrastructure skills who wants to shape technical direction, raise reliability standards, and develop the engineers on the team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, build, and ongoing evolution of secure, scalable cloud platforms that serve federal missions
• Set and own Infrastructure-as-Code standards and their implementation, using Terraform or a similar tool
• Design, automate, and maintain CI/CD pipelines so software ships quickly, safely, and repeatably
• Define and monitor reliability practices, covering SLIs, SLOs, monitoring, alerting, and observability
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems for production issues, and push for permanent fixes
• Build automation that cuts manual effort, strengthens resilience, and accelerates delivery
• Write runbooks and procedures for troubleshooting, maintenance, and disaster recovery
• Test new and emerging technologies through prototypes and proofs of concept, weighing benefits and risks before adoption
• Work with development, architecture, security, and product teams to deliver integrated, production-ready solutions
• Lead technical discussions, architecture reviews, and platform decisions
• Mentor engineers and guide them while setting platform engineering standards and best practices

Requirements

• Senior technical leader who likes solving complex infrastructure and reliability problems at scale
• Automates first, and builds systems that are simple to operate and recover
• Comfortable leading technical conversations and shaping engineering direction
• Stays calm and methodical during production incidents
• Collaborative and proactive, and quick to learn new projects and technologies
• Cares about building secure, high-quality systems in mission-driven settings
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 9+ years of professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering, including technical leadership
• Experience with governance processes, technical standards, formal change management, or shared enterprise services
• Able to identify dependencies and explain resource needs, tradeoffs, risks, and decisions to product leadership
• Strong hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Linux, and CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI
• Proven experience managing Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform or a similar tool
• Experience designing and running workloads in a cloud environment; AWS preferred, GCP or Azure considered
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or CloudWatch
• Proficient in scripting and automation with Bash, Python, or Go
• Working knowledge of databases and SQL
• Experience troubleshooting production systems, tuning performance, and leading root cause analysis
• Understanding of DevSecOps practices and secure infrastructure principles
• Strong communication, problem-solving, and technical leadership skills
• Experience writing clear product status updates, operational metrics, dashboards, and risk narratives
• Strong stakeholder management and ability to coordinate across product, program, engineering, security, and operations groups
• Experience coordinating shared resources or cross-team technical dependencies
• People management experience
• Experience with Harness.io
• Familiarity with Zero Trust principles and FedRAMP or ATO processes
• Experience with service mesh, GitOps tools (Argo CD, Flux), or serverless platforms
• Relevant certifications such as CKA, AWS Solutions Architect, or AWS DevOps Engineer
• Experience supporting federal government agencies

Conditions

Applicants must be US citizens and able to obtain Public Trust clearance

Estimated salary range of $140k, $200k per year; the final offer depends on experience, skills, and other factors

Full-time position

Remote work; any hybrid roles will be stated in the job post

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Life insurance and short- and long-term disability coverage

Employee assistance program

401(k) with 4% employer match

Generous PTO policy

Annual continuing education budget

Annual wellness budget

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package
• Bonus incentive programs for employee referrals and performance-based rewards