Senior AWS Platform Engineer

About the role

Want to energize your career? Looking for stability with the freedom to innovate? At CertiPath you can have both while making the world more secure and simplifying access processes. We are seeking an experienced Senior AWS Platform Engineer to lead the design, security, and scaling of our AWS EKS-based CI/CD platform and bootstrap our IVIP production cloud services. Join our team of engineers, make a difference, and crush your goals at CertiPath. CertiPath is a trusted leader in high-assurance digital identity and access management solutions. Since 2004, we have helped commercial organizations and government agencies modernize how people securely access facilities, networks, and critical resources. With the stability of an established company and the agility of a growing technology business, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous growth. Our mission is simple: enable secure, trusted access in an increasingly connected world. Location: Reston, VA (Hybrid).

Responsibilities

• Technical leader and individual contributor who sets the bar for AWS Kubernetes and SaaS infrastructure excellence across the organization.
• Design and deliver secure, high-performance, production-grade CI/CD systems on AWS EKS using GitHub Actions and partner closely with platform, security, and executive leadership to shape the technical roadmap for our AWS EKS.
• Lead the design, provisioning, and ongoing maintenance of production-grade AWS EKS clusters (Rancher-managed) using Infrastructure as Code.
• Own the reliability, availability, performance, and security of production cloud services, including participation in an on-call rotation and off-hours incident response.
• Architect, deploy, and scale Actions Runner Controller (both legacy and the new GitHub-supported gha-runner-scale-set) on AWS EKS with ephemeral runner pods, autoscaling, and GitHub App-based authentication.
• Champion cybersecurity best practices across the entire platform, including least-privilege IAM, pod security policies, network policies, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and compliance controls.
• Optimize container image building pipelines (Docker-in-Docker → Kaniko) and manage internal registries (Nexus, Harbor) to support our SaaS delivery platforms.
• Write and maintain Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes manifests for EKS, networking, node pools, storage, and CI/CD components while driving GitOps practices.
• Help design and manage hybrid networking between AWS EKS and on-prem Nutanix environments, including VLANs, routing, Load Balancer services, and secure egress to GitHub Enterprise and other SaaS services.
• Instrument Prometheus/Grafana stacks, monitor runner pod lifecycle, build performance, and cluster resource utilization while implementing proactive scaling.

Qualifications

• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain a government clearance.
• At least a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• AWS CloudOps Engineer-Associate Certification.
• 8+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience or DevOps experience.
• 5+ years of expert-level AWS Kubernetes experience with EKS (Rancher-managed), EC2 (spot + reserved instances), VPC networking, IAM, Security Groups, Transit Gateway, and cost-optimized SaaS infrastructure on AWS.
• Deep expertise building and operating production CI/CD platforms at scale, including on-call support and incident response.
• Expert-level Kubernetes and CI/CD experience, including Actions Runner Controller (legacy + new gha-runner-scale-set), Helm, ephemeral runners, Docker-in-Docker, Kaniko, and GitHub Enterprise (ghe.com).
• Strong IaC and automation skills with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes manifests, and GitOps workflows.
• A strong security-first mindset with hands