Platform Engineer — Cloud Native (Kubernetes, AWS) | Secret

Defense Unicorns; United States; Remote; USD 130,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium health premiums paid

Health Savings Account

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Platform Engineer to join a combined DevOps and SRE platform team responsible for a cloud-based environment. The role emphasizes Kubernetes clusters, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, and IAM with security-focused practices.

The candidate will bridge application teams and the platform, promoting best practices, and supporting on-call incident response in a remote, asynchronous setting.

Qualifications

• Active Secret clearance to start or ability to obtain one.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience—deploying and troubleshooting clusters.
• Experience with IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi or similar).
• Proficiency with CI/CD tooling, especially GitLab CI or equivalent.
• Linux/Unix administration knowledge.
• Experience with AWS (EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, VPC).
• Familiarity with Docker and container image management.
• Ability to read/write YAML for Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and pipelines.
• Strong problem-solving and ability to work independently in a remote environment.
• DoD 8570 IAT II certification or the ability to obtain it.

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and improve Kubernetes clusters and deployments across cloud environments (AWS, EKS, RKE2).
• Develop and manage infrastructure as code to provision platform resources consistently.
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, including GitLab CI configuration and automation.
• Support IAM through tools like Keycloak and manage user roles.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging for platform health and incident responses.
• Manage certificate lifecycle and automation for public certs.
• Contribute to platform security, including container security and ATO processes.
• Collaborate with application teams to troubleshoot deployment and pipeline issues.
• Write and maintain runbooks, ADRs, and architectural standards.
• Contribute to strategic planning aligning tech advances with mission objectives.
• Participate in on-call rotations and support tier 2 platform incidents.
• Mentor junior engineers through pairing and code reviews.

Skills

Kubernetes

Terraform/Pulumi

GitLab CI

Linux/Linux

AWS

Docker

YAML

On-call readiness

DoD 8570 IAT II

Job description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Platform Engineer to join a combined DevOps and SRE platform team responsible for a cloud-based environment. The role emphasizes Kubernetes clusters, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, and IAM with security-focused practices.

The candidate will bridge application teams and the platform, promoting best practices, and supporting on-call incident response in a remote, asynchronous setting.