Senior Platform Engineer
MITRE · Colorado Springs, CO · Yesterday
Engineering$129k–$162k/yrFull-time
At MITRE, your passion fuels work that impacts our nation and improves lives. This is where your skills strengthen national security, cybersecurity, health, transportation, and citizen services. We’re a nonprofit engineering, applied research, and advanced technology organization working in the public interest. With objectivity and integrity at our core, we lead federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies – collaborating with industry and academia to deliver integrated, high-impact solutions that advance our nation’s health, security, and prosperity. Our people tackle the toughest technical challenges, supported by competitive benefits, meaningful career development, and a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Choose MITRE for a career with purpose — and help shape the future. MITRE Mission Computing is a new organization that bridges the gap between Mission and Technology and helps enable MTIRE projects to focus on their work, without worrying about compliance and the underlying platform infrastructure. We apply new technologies that can address the Government's most challenging Systems Engineering problems. This is an opportunity for experienced platform engineers who are highly motivated, innovative, and proactive and interested in owning and maintaining their work to enable the rest of MITRE and sponsors. Roles & Responsibilities: MITRE Mission Computing is seeking a Platform Engineer to own and evolve the foundational systems that enable critical national security work across MITRE’s Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. This is a broad, high-ownership role at the intersection of Kubernetes platform engineering and cloud infrastructure. You will be responsible for the reliability and security of the compute platforms that power internal tools and the development and production environments that enable engineering, research, and mission teams to move faster with confidence, while guiding those teams on how best to adopt and utilize what you provide. You will operate in a high-stakes environment defined by novel problems and real constraints, including CMMC compliance, high availability, and cyber resilience. In this environment you will provide the platforms that enable engineering teams of varying skill maturities to deliver innovative solutions and AI-enabled capabilities to MITRE’s U.S. government sponsors. If you are energized by solving hard problems at scale, prefer deep technical ownership over narrow specialization, and want your engineering decisions to have lasting impact, we would like to hear from you. Basic Qualifications: Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 3 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with relevant experience who can immediately contribute at this job step; or equivalent of related education and work experience.Bachelor’s degree in software engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.5 years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent) with demonstrated hands-on experience designing, building, operating, and evolving production Kubernetes platforms (cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, observability, and security) or equivalent internal platform infrastructure.Strong cloud infrastructure experience (preferably AWS, including GovCloud or other regulated environments)Experience with multi-cluster, multi-tenant, or hybrid-cloud Kubernetes architecturesProficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent) and GitOps practicesExperience authoring and operating CI/CD pipelines that support platform and application workloads, including integration with Infrastructure as Code and GitOps workflowsDemonstrated ability to build reliable, secure compute platforms that other engineering teams depend onDemonstrated experience with incident management, including participation in on-call rotations (e.g., PagerDuty) and driving post-incident reviewsExperience hardening systems for compliance requirements (e.g., CMMC, FedRAMP, or similar frameworks)Ability to work effectively amid novel problems, shifting constraints, and multi-stakeholdersStrong communication skills with the ability to guide and influence engineering teams on platform best practicesDeep experience operating mixed Linux and Windows environments at scale, including cross-platform identity, security controls, and platform services that support both ecosystemsHands-on experience with monitoring, alerting, and observability stacks (e.g., Grafana, Loki, Alloy, and related logging pipelines), including integration with incident management toolsExperience operating platforms that engineering teams rely on to take workloads into production, including supporting their use of platform-provided monitoring, alerting, and incident management capabilitiesStrong communication skills with demonstrated experience briefing senior government or senior customer stakeholders on status, critical decisions, and technical recommendationsMust be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S Government issued Security Clearance. Per the U.S. Government’s eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.This position requires a minimum of 3 days per week on-site in McLean, VA, Bedford, MA, San Diego, CA or Colorado Springs, CO Preferred Qualifications: Experience with including service mesh, network policy enforcement, policy-as-code, runtime security detection, and automated response with multi-cluster, multi-tenant, or hybrid-cloud Kubernetes architecturesExperience operating platforms in CMMC or high-side environmentsDemonstrated experience taking software from development into production and supporting it under real customer utilizationBackground building internal developer platforms, self-service interfaces, or abstractions that improve team velocityFamiliarity with AI/ML workloads, GPU orchestration, or enabling AI-enabled capabilities on shared platformsPrior work supporting national security, DoD, or other U.S. government sponsorsDeep knowledge of container security, policy-as-code, and zero-trust patternsTrack record of driving CVE remediation at scale across container platforms and virtual machines, with the ability to analyze underlying CWEs to prevent recurring classes of weaknessesTrack record of mentoring or enabling other teams to effectively utilize shared platformsExperience improving incident response processes, reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR), or leading reliability initiativesExperience designing and operating platforms where tenant teams own their application-level incident response and vulnerability mitigation, while the platform team owns the underlying reliability, observability, and escalation pathsTrack record of enabling other teams to confidently operate their services in production through clear platform interfaces, runbooks, and shared incident management practicesActive Secret Clearance This requisition requires the candidate to have a minimum of the following clearance(s): None This requisition requires the hired candidate to have or obtain, within one year from the date of hire, the following clearance(s): Secret Salary compensation range and midpoint: $129,200 - $161,500 - $193,800 Annual Work Location Type: Onsite It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. 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