Principal Platform Engineer

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.

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.

Key Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• Working experience with relational and non-relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch
• Comfortable provisioning and debugging complex CI/CD pipelines
• Extensive experience in containerizing applications using Docker and orchestrating them on managed platforms
• Experienced in building data-intensive platforms and using open-source technologies
• Enjoy collaborating with the team to plan story points, sprint themes, etc
• Experience with at least one agile methodology, including Scrum or Kanban
• Loves to demo work to team and stakeholders
• Obtain Security+ within the first 90 days of employment with Raft

Highly Preferred:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
• Infrastructure as Code experience, specifically using Terraform
• vSphere experience

Clearance Requirements:

• Active Secret security clearance

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.