PLATFORM ENGINEER (CI Poly Required)

NorthHill Technology; Chantilly (VA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

NorthHill Technology Resources seeks a Platform Engineer to support a Federal Program in Chantilly, VA. The role requires 3-6 years of relevant experience and an active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph.

The candidate will design, deploy, secure, and operate highly available Kubernetes environments across clusters and cloud platforms. Proficiency with containerization (Docker), CI/CD tooling, and IaC is essential.

Qualifications

• 3-6 years of relevant experience in platform engineering or cloud-native environments.
• Active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph is required.
• Experience with Kubernetes clusters design, deployment, and security best practices.

Skills

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

GitOps

Terraform

SRE

Monitoring

Networking

Linux

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Jenkins

GitLab CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Tekton

Argo Workflows

Kustomize

Terraform

Job description

NorthHill Technology Resources has an exciting opportunity for aPlatform Engineerto support a Federal Program inChantilly, VA. This is a direct-hire role with our client, a highly respected firm in the Intelligence Community. The ideal candidate will have 3-6 years of relevant experience.

Due to the Nature of the work, aTS/SCI Clearance and CI Polygraphis required.

Platform Engineer Role Description

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).
• Leadership Problem-Solving: Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues in distributed systems.
• Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills to collaborate effectively with development teams, operations, security, and other stakeholders. Collaboration: Ability to work effectively in a team environment, mentor junior engineers, and lead technical initiatives.
• Proactive & Ownership: Proactive approach to identifying and addressing potential issues, with a strong sense of ownership over the platform.
• Adaptability & Continuous Learning: Eagerness to learn new technologies and adapt to a rapidly evolving cloud-native landscape.

Additional Skills & Requirements

• Relevant certifications (e.g., CKA, CKAD, CKS, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Azure DevOps Engineer Expert).
• Experience with specific Kubernetes operators, custom resource definitions (CRDs), or building internal developer platforms (IDPs).
• Travel up to 20% of the time, as required, to perform on-site installations, maintenance, and troubleshooting activities at customer sites or data centers.

Clearance Requirements

Active TS/SCI clearance with Counterintelligence polygraph

Have current IAM Level II to satisfy DOD 8570 IAT