Principal Platform Engineer, Shift5

• 10+ years in software/platform engineering, with 5+ years managing production infrastructure at scale
• Technical & People Leadership: Proven track record leading projects, designing architecture, mentoring engineers, and readiness (or prior experience) for direct people management
• Cloud & Modern Delivery: Hands-on mastery of Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions/Earthly, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/OpenTofu, AWS/GovCloud)
• Supply Chain Security: Strong background in artifact registries, container signing (Cosign/Sigstore), Vault, and SBOM generation
• Clearance: Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Security Clearance (U.S. Citizenship required)

Desirable

• The Platform Engineering team owns four core capabilities: Operating Systems (BaseOS, Manifold, Yocto), Cloud & Infrastructure (AWS/GovCloud to edge), Developer Experience (CI/CD guardrails, internal tooling), and AI Enablement (secure AI orchestration and tooling)
• As Principal Platform Engineer, you are the senior-most individual contributor on the team, serving as the primary technical anchor for architecture and a key multiplier for the engineering org
• You will drive overall technical strategy, mentor senior engineers, and step into direct team leadership or people management as needed
• Release Engineering: Architect, develop, and operate end-to-end release infrastructure and GitOps delivery pipelines using tools like Atlantis, ArgoCD, Earthly Lunar, GitHub, and internally developed tools
• Cloud Infrastructure: Architect and manage a complicated AWS estate spanning commercial and govcloud using services like EKS, RDS, S3, VPC, Transit Gateway, etc
• Supply Chain Security & Compliance: Lead artifact security (Harbor, Cosign, Vault Transit Engine) and build automated, compliance-by-default pipelines (NIST controls, SBOM generation) to eliminate program friction
• OS Lifecycle & AI Enablement: Support hardware OS image builds (Yocto, Manifold) and productionize internal AI gateways, RAG tooling, and developer AI workflows (Cursor)
• Technical & Team Leadership: Author RFCs/design docs, run architecture reviews, plan roadmaps, and mentor mid/staff-level engineers. Provide direct management (1:1s, hiring, performance reviews) during transitions or scale
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with security, embedded, and field teams to ensure seamless delivery across airgapped and edge environments
• ---What Success Looks Like---
• Predictable Delivery: Release engineering is seamless, observable, and fully trusted across teams
• Automated Security: Compliance evidence and SBOMs are generated natively in CI/CD without manual overhead
• Governed AI: AI tooling is securely integrated, well-documented, and actively adopted by developers
• Team Growth & Resilience: Engineering standards elevate across the org, priorities remain clear, and team leadership operates without single points of failure