Principal Platform Engineer

This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.

Who we are:

Raft (https://TeamRaft.com) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional small business with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development, with headquarters in McLean, VA. Our range of clients includes innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting-edge tech stack, and cloud-native ecosystem. We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Platform Engineer to support our customers and join our passionate team of high-impact problem solvers.

About the role:

The Principal Platform Engineer shall have senior software engineering experience building and operating hybrid-infrastructure developer platforms (private and commercial cloud infrastructure) at an Individual Contributor Level. A successful candidate has prior experience deploying Kubernetes in multiple ways and supporting automation of platform management at the enterprise scale. The engineer shall have experience developing platform APIs that make common software operations scalable and repeatable. The engineer will feel comfortable maintaining the underlying services required to host containerized applications. The engineer will be at least a mid to senior-level engineer capable of mentoring junior developers and engineers. The engineer will also possess effective communication skills to interact with various stakeholders, internal and external to the organization.

What we are looking for: 

• Provide guidance for the design and architecture of provisioning/maintaining Kubernetes clusters at a massive scale
• Implement rapid proof of concept and pilots of new capabilities to demonstrate the feasibility of new solutions to application developers and the rest of the platform integration team
• Work closely with the client and other key stakeholders to provide strategic input and help navigate needs and tradeoffs to build extensible digital solutions
• Ideally, 5+ years' in-depth experience maintaining production-grade Kubernetes clusters with multiple teams using the clusters for development
• 5+ years' experience building production services with cloud infrastructure such as AWS (preferred, or at least last 1-2 years), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
• 3+ years' experience with modern programming languages such as Java, Python, or Go
• Managed infrastructure and developed APIs/platform services for tenants to use container services
• Linux experience
• Comfortable provisioning and debugging complex CI/CD pipelines
• Extensive experience in containerizing applications using …