Staff Platform Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to be the senior-most technical authority on a government agency’s internal developer platform, owning target-state architecture, golden paths, and engineering standards that make secure, compliant infrastructure the easiest path to production for engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Own target-state platform architecture, golden paths, and engineering standards across the platform engineering effort.
• Serve as the senior-most technical authority on the platform build, providing technical direction to the Platform Enablement team.
• Design and evolve internal platform capabilities that improve delivery speed, deployment safety, and reliability across engineering teams.
• Establish infrastructure automation, delivery pipelines, and secure provisioning patterns for mission-critical, FedRAMP-authorized systems.
• Standardize observability, environment consistency, and release controls across multiple applications.
• Reduce operational toil by building self-service platform capabilities and reusable engineering patterns (golden-path templates, IaC modules).
• Act as a hands-on platform leader, setting standards, driving adoption, and preventing fragmentation across teams.
• Partner with the client’s Product Owner and Staff Technical Product Manager on platform roadmap and prioritization.
• Participate in two-week Agile sprints, architecture reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Other relevant duties as qualified and trained to perform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and at least eight (8) years of related experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing and evolving internal platforms that improve delivery speed, deployment safety, and reliability across teams.
• Deep expertise in infrastructure automation, delivery pipelines, environment design, and secure provisioning for mission-critical systems.
• Proven ability to standardize observability, environment consistency, and release controls across multiple applications.
• Experience reducing operational toil by building self-service platform capabilities and reusable engineering patterns.
• Demonstrated hands-on platform leadership: setting standards, driving adoption, and preventing fragmentation across teams.
• Solid experience with GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Datadog, and Terraform-based golden-path/IaC patterns.

Nice to have skills and experience

• Prior experience on federal digital services or similar large-scale, multi-team modernization contracts.
• Experience applying AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitLab AI features, AWS Bedrock) within FedRAMP-authorized boundaries.
• Experience with federal financial or benefits systems.