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.

• Architect, develop and implement end-to-end cluster and application lifecycles 
  
• Work with clients architecting, developing and implementing Kubernetes or Docker solutions both in the Cloud and on-premises
  
• Develop and implement CI/CD pipelines 
  
• Implement GitOps for Software Delivery

What we are looking for: 

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in platform engineering or a related technical field
• In-depth experience creating and maintaining Kubernetes clusters through both managed services (e.g., AKS, EKS, or GKE) and self-managed installers (e.g., EKS-A, RKE2, or kubeadm)
• Extensive experience managing compute resources for Kubernetes clusters (CSI solutions, ResourceQuotas, etc.)
• Working experience managing network resources for Kubernetes clusters (CNI solutions, NetworkPolicies, etc.)
• Proven experience managing and troubleshooting Kubernetes workloads at an enterprise scale
• Experience deploying and maintaining platform services (e.g., Istio, Keycloak, Vault, Harbor, ArgoCD, CertManager, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, FluentBit, FluentD) 
• Experience configuring metrics scraping and monitoring dashboards (e.g., Prometheus and Grafana configurations) 
• Experiencing configuring log forwarding, filtering, and aggregation (e.g., Loki, FluentBit, or FluentD) 
• Experience hardening Kubernetes clusters via RBAC, Audit Policies, admission controllers (e.g., OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno), image scanning (e.g., Trivy, Sysdig, or NeuVector), NetworkPolicies, CIS benchmark, and CISA/NSA Hardening Guidance 
• Relevant experience deploying, maintaining and monitoring cloud-based computeresources (e.g., AWS EC2 and EBS, Azure Virtual Machines and premium storage, etc.) 
• Relevant experience deploying, maintaining and monitoring on-premises compute infrastructure (e.g., blade servers, edge devices, VMware virtual machines, etc.) 
• Relevant experience deploying, maintaining and monitoring cloud-based network resources (e.g., AWS VPCs, Subnets and Security Groups, Azure Virtual Networks and Network Security Groups, etc.)
• Able to obtain a Security+ certification within the first 90 days of employment with Raft

Highly preferred:

• Relevant experience deploying and managing storage arrays and/or distributed filesystems (e.g., SANs, Rook Ceph, etc.) 
• Relevant experience deploying and managing physical network infrastructure (e.g., firewalls, routers, switches, etc.) 
• Relevant experience deploying, mai