Platform Engineer - Secret/Top Secret
About the role
Role Description
Defense Unicorns is seeking talented and versatile Platform Engineers to join a team of dedicated unicorns advancing freedom and independence globally. In this role, you will help build and sustain a self-managed production environment — serving as the crucial link between application developers and the platform that supports them — while contributing to the growth of Defense Unicorns' capabilities and open source products.
Our teams work across varied technical baselines depending on engagement, with a focus on the Platform layer. To deliver for our Mission Heroes, we also work across IaC automation, security hardening, and implementation. Depending on your level, you'll either be executing with excellence on that platform or helping shape its long-term direction.
Responsibilities
All Platform Engineers are expected to:
- Operate and maintain Production UDS Cloud Environments (Kubernetes and the UDS baseline of tools we deliver to Mission Heroes/Customers), supporting teams operating within that environment
- Develop and maintain a secure, scalable, and observable environment based on Infrastructure-as-Code, leveraging Terraform/OpenTofu across various Kubernetes distributions (EKS, RKE2, and others)
- Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines supporting the full software development lifecycle — compiling, scanning, containerizing, testing, linting, deploying, monitoring, and releasing
- Leverage a diverse set of cloud and on-prem IaaS providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, vSphere, Proxmox, LXD) to build robust, scalable systems for cloud, on-prem, and hybrid architectures
- Design and implement observability tooling — particularly stacks built on Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana — to help teams diagnose and resolve production-impacting incidents
- Participate in on-call rotation to address production-impacting incidents (business hours only for now)
- Identify and articulate gaps in existing processes, contributing insights to the product backlog
- Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Work within an Agile framework in a remote environment
Senior Platform Engineers are additionally expected to:
- Contribute to long-term platform direction