Principal Platform Engineer

Clarity Innovations; Columbia, Herndon (MD, VA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Clarity Innovations is seeking a DevOps engineer on the Infrastructure Team to build, maintain, and support the platform infrastructure, including API gateway deployments, serverless workloads, and data retention considerations.

You will collaborate with development teams to strengthen CI/CD, implement IaC with Terraform, and ensure security, reliability, and cost efficiency across the stack.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of Terraform for IaC.
• Significant experience with GitLab CI/CD workflows.
• Experience deploying containerized and serverless workloads.

Responsibilities

• Maintain health and security of core platform and data sources.
• Improve developer experience via CI/CD pipelines and tooling.
• Automate manual processes and support incident response.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design scalable, secure solutions.
• Document infrastructure configurations and architectures.

Skills

Terraform

GitLab CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

Podman

Serverless workloads

Databases

Tools

Helm

ArgoCD

Ansible

Puppet

Chef

Airflow

EMR

Job description

Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.

Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.

We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.

Position Summary

As a DevOps engineer on the Infrastructure Team, you will have the opportunity and challenge of being involved in all portions of our product offerings. Our core responsibilities are building, maintaining and supporting the infrastructure which drives the product platform. While our core responsibilities remain the same, we adjust quite frequently in support of other teams. One Sprint you may be deploying an API gateway for a new serverless API, the next you may be asked to review, design and implement a scalable data retention policy. The Infrastructure team advances the organizational strategy in deployment/release automation, infrastructure stability, and disaster recovery planning.

On a day to day basis, you’ll be responsible for the development and maintenance of

• The overall health and status of the core platform & corresponding data sources, including the protection of infrastructure against external cybersecurity threats
• Improvements to developer experience, not limited to, but including CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, etc.
• Automation of manual processes
• Collaborating with development teams to provide support to our Operations team and internal customers
• Participate in incident response and troubleshooting efforts, identifying and resolving infrastructure-related issues quickly.

As a member of the infrastructure team, you’ll be expected to

• Work closely with development teams to ensure infrastructure supports the software development life cycle, including continuous integration and deployment.
• Evaluate new technologies and common services and make recommendations for their use.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement scalable, secure, and reliable solutions.
• Write high quality and maintainable codebases to deploy and maintain infrastructure
• Identify technical problems and develop software updates and fixes
• Monitor processes during their entire lifecycle to update or define new processes for improving reliability and minimizing infrastructure costs
• Assist in the development and implementation of engineering standards and best practices for other teams.
• Participate in cross team Scrum events to improve the overall quality of processes for our product teams
• Assist in ensuring compliance with security and regulatory requirements.
• Develop and maintain documentation & diagrams related to infrastructure configurations, processes & architectures.

Required:

• Strong understanding of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Significant experience with Gitlab CI/CD
• Experience in deploying & maintaining containerized and serverless workloads
• Experience with a variety of databases & datastores (Relational, Columnar and NoSQL)
• Proficient in provisioning and maintaining linux-based infrastructure & container based architectures (Docker, Podman, Kubernetes)

Nice to have:

• Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow, EMR, etc.
• Experience with configuration management tooling (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.)
• Experience with deployment tooling (Helm, ArgoCD, etc)
• Experience with real time monitoring and observability tooling.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.