Principal Platform Engineer - Computing Services

The Principal Platform Engineer - DevOps Engineering is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining automation, infrastructure, and deployment solutions to support administrative operations, academic and research computing. This role focuses on hybrid on premise and public cloud environments, enabling Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment (CDE) to facilitate cutting-edge seamless IT service delivery. The engineer will integrate complementary platforms and systems via APIs and intermediate distributed components. The engineer will also optimize deployments, enhance infrastructure reliability, security, and automation. This role includes staff primarily responsible for server design and management within a central group supporting enterprise wide systems or within a college or division overseeing complex multi user systems. Ensures long-term requirements of systems operations and administration are included in overall information systems planning. May serve as a project lead on systems administration projects. Provides direction and training to lower level staff.

Your core responsibilities will include:

• Design, implement, and manage CI/CD pipelines to automate software deployment for enterprise applications using tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI/CD.

• Develop and maintain hybrid cloud and on-premise infrastructure leveraging infrastructure-as-code (IaC) frameworks like Terraform or Puppet to standardize deployment and configuration.

• Deploy and manage containerized applications and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes or OpenShift to support scalable workloads, administrative applications and related computing environments.

• Integrate and automate major university administrative systems including student information systems and identity management solutions (e.g., Active Directory, Sailpoint, Microsoft Entra, LDAP, or CyberArk).

• Manage software and artifact repositories utilizing solutions like JFrog Artifactory, Nexus, or similar tools to facilitate software versioning and deployment.

• Enhance administrative process automation through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) methodologies using platforms like Power Automate, or open-source alternatives.

• Ensure security best practices in deployment pipelines, implementing secure access management and secret storage using tools such as CyberArk or other privileged access management solutions.

• Program lead for monitoring and observability practice in the Divisional governance group. Monitor and optimize system performance by leveraging observability and logging tools, such as Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK Stack, to ensure reliable operations for academic and research services.

• Collaborate with senior leadership, faculty, researchers, and IT teams to drive automation, cloud adoption, and continuous improvement of platform services in support of the university’s academic and research missions.

• Other duties as assigned.

Flexibility, excellence, and passion are vital qualities within Computing Services. Inclusion, collaboration, and cultural sensitivity are valued competencies at CMU. Therefore, we are in search of a team member who is able to effectively interact with a varied population of internal and external partners at a high level of integrity. We are looking for someone who shares our values and who will support the mission of the university through their work.

Preferred Skills & Qualifications:

• Three (3) or more years of experience designing, implementing, and maintaining IaC or container CI/CD platform serving a hybrid infrastructure.

• Masters degree in Information Technology, Computer Science or related field.

• Experience in higher education IT environments supporting administrative computing, student information systems, and academic applications.

• Expertise in hybrid cloud and on-premise infrastructure design, automation, and management.

• Proficiency in container orchestration and deployment using platforms such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or OpenShift.

• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, and software development workflows utilizing tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or AWS for DevOps. \

• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and configuration management solutions, such as Terraform or Puppet.

• Deep understanding of containerization technologies including Docker, Podman, or alternative container runtimes.

• Familiarity with compliance and security standards relevant to higher education such as FERPA, HIPAA,