Principal Platform Engineer

About the role

Join a world-class team of scientists, engineers, and business professionals to advance the state-of-the-art in quantum computing. As Principal Platform Engineer, you will design and operate the systems that power Atom Computing’s quantum computing and research workflows. You will drive key trade-off decisions across reliability, security, scalability, and cost for infrastructure spanning on-prem lab environments and cloud platforms. This role requires solid expertise in infrastructure and platform engineering, strong systems thinking, and the ability to navigate complex design problems. Due to collaboration needs with Atom’s software, hardware, and control systems teams, this position is required to be in the office in Boulder, CO at least 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain classical compute infrastructure supporting quantum control systems
• Work closely with Atom Computing’s software engineers, control systems engineers, and physicists to understand workload requirements and deliver compute infrastructure that meets them
• Own infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, and system observability across on-prem lab environments and cloud platforms
• Establish and enforce security, access control, and compliance standards (e.g., NIST 800-53, SOC2) across systems
• Participate in on-call rotation and drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements
• Evaluate and integrate new infrastructure tooling, balancing build-vs-buy decisions against team velocity and operational overhead

Requirements

• BS or advanced degree in Computer Science
• 7+ years of post-degree experience as an infrastructure, platform, or systems engineer

Qualifications

• Have gone through a complete infrastructure build-out or major platform migration
• Currently working with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or similar)
• Currently working with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Podman, Kubernetes)
• Experience managing hybrid environments spanning on-prem hardware (Proxmox, K8S) and cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals, Linux systems administration, and CI/CD pipeline design
• Expertise in monitoring, logging, and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent)

Benefits

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their dependents
• Unlimited paid time off
• 401K company matching
• Short- and long-term disability insurance
• FSA and dependent care benefits
• Life insurance
• Daily drinks, snacks, and catered team lunches in the office

Pay

Base salary range: $170,000 – $200,000, commensurate with experience. Additional compensation includes an annual bonus and company equity.

This role is based in Boulder, CO and requires in-office presence at least 3 days per week.