Staff Platform Engineer

EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE AN ACTIVE SECRET CLEARANCE TO APPLY.

Staff Platform Engineer

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join our team. This role is responsible for designing, building, and owning the runtime production environment that bridges applications (custom development, COTS, and OSS) to the underlying platform. You will drive platform architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and serve as the technical anchor between application teams and platform teams.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will own platform strategy and implementation end-to-end: defining technical roadmaps, solving complex problems that span multiple domains, driving cross-team delivery efficiency, and mentoring engineers across the team. We are looking for someone who builds and owns platforms, not someone who operates within infrastructure others have designed.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain scalable runtime production environments across cloud-native and containerized systems, including transforming applications into Kubernetes-friendly formats for bare-metal deployment
• Own the technical roadmap for the platform vertical, identifying gaps, planning initiatives, and aligning engineering effort to mission objectives
• Provide mentorship to engineers across the team, fostering professional development and raising the technical bar
• Identify technical overlap across projects and guide teams on leveraging each other for efficient delivery
• Work closely with Mission Managers, providing insights on engineering competency, capacity, velocity, and alignment with mission objectives
• Collaborate with product teams, providing feedback on product fit and contributing to product direction based on production usage
• Work with customers to define technical roadmaps that align to mission objectives
• Advocate for and enforce DevSecOps practices across the platform layer, including security automation, container security, and compliance
• Evaluate and select optimal methods for solving complex business problems, assessing new products and their potential impact on mission objectives
• Drive continuous improvement in CI/CD pipelines, deployment patterns, and operational tooling

Travel requirements: 25% travel

Required Qualifications

• US citizenship and eligible to obtain a Secret security clearance
• Expertise in solving highly technical problems that span multiple knowledge domains
• Deep knowledge in 1-2 key technologies such as pipelines, GitOps, Kubernetes, or Go
• Demonstrated experience with Kubernetes and container-based systems
• Expert with YAML
• Proficient with security automation and familiarity with API Security, Container Security, and Cloud Security
• Proficient in architecture security design, monitoring, and performance instrumentation in complex enterprise environments
• Experience with continuous delivery, distributed architectures, everything-as-code, containerization, and cloud services
• Proficient in identifying and articulating gaps in existing processes and iterating toward better ways of working
• Proven track record of evaluating and selecting optimal methods for solving complex business problems
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across cross-functional teams
• Experience working on a team following an Agile framework in a remote environment

Preferred Qualifications

• DoD 8570 IAT II certification or ability to obtain…