Role Description:

We are actively seeking a skilled and motivated Senior or Staff-Level Platform Engineer to join our team. The ideal candidate will play a crucial role in the development, maintenance, and user/community engagement of our platform and its upstream open source dependencies. This position requires demonstrating a strong understanding of system architecture, problem-solving skills, and the ability to guide junior to mid-level engineers.

As a Senior or Staff Platform Engineer within our organization, you will join a team of dedicated unicorns who are focused on advancing freedom and independence globally.

Responsibilities:

You will create and maintain tools that are the crucial link between Application (Capability) Providers and disparate Production Environments.

In this position, you will be expected to:

Engineering Collaboration:

Create and nurture an engineering environment that fosters collaboration, sharing of ideas, and cross-functional teamwork
Actively participate in Defense Unicorns all-remote environment, contributing to the open source presence and engaging with the team

Productization and Reusability:

Productize solutions to ensure their reusability across different runtime environments
Manage and contribute to projects that improve the delivery of mission value through effective planning, development, testing, and version support

Technology Tracking and Integration:

Track and evaluate emerging technologies, making determinations and recommendations for integration into existing Defense Unicorns products to enhance mission impact
Solve new problems that may require in-depth knowledge from a variety of technologies

Communication and Documentation:

Communicate proactively and routinely with coworkers and all team members on key product or project milestones, new feature work, the overall product roadmap, user interviews/discovery efforts, and any issues/blockers
Participate actively as a code reviewer for cross-company and cross-team initiatives and products

The listed responsibilities are not exhaustive and additional responsibilities may be assigned based on the evolving needs of the organization. We are seeking a dynamic individual who is able to adapt and take on new responsibilities as they arise.

Preferred Experience and Qualifications:

Strong open source presence with a track record of contribution or maintenance or projects in the CNCF, OpenSSF or other foundations
Demonstrated ability to develop software in Go, TypeScript, or similar languages
Experience managing platform and infrastructure with terraform or equivalent technologies
Proven systems thinking applied to strong CI/CD strategies for efficient software delivery
Experience working in a remote environment that encourages asynchronous PR reviews and strong GitOps practices
Familiarity with core technologies we leverage such as: Grafana, Istio, Loki, Neuvector, Pepr, Prometheus, Promtail, Authservice, Keycloak, Velero and Zarf
Proven experience in creating collaborative engineering environments that encourage idea sharing

Senior Platform Engineer: $180,000 - $219,000
Staff Platform Engineer: $209,000 - $279,225

Who We Are

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.

What We Do

We create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.

Who We Serve

Defense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.

What We Work On

Kubernetes
Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
GitOps
Containers
CNCF projects and open source products and packages
Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
Building and improving security delivery
Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health:

Medical/Dental/Vision
Premiums are 100% Company Paid
Health Reimbursement Account
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance

Financial:

401k Retirement Plan
Company Stock Options
Home Office Budget

Leave:

Unlimited paid time off, with a mandatory 10 days off on top of 11 federal government holidays, week of Thanksgiving, last two weeks of December (including New Year’s Day)
Paid Parental Leave

Learning:

Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

Don’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they dont meet every requirement listed.

At Defense Unicorns, were committed to diversity. If youre enthusiastic about the role but dont match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

CCPA DISCLOSURE