Platform Engineer

Platform Engineering Engineer

Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the "art and science of building," providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.

Platform Engineering exists for one reason: to make every engineering team in the organization faster, more reliable, and more confident in how they build and ship. This has never been more critical than right now - AI is fundamentally changing where solution contribution originates, and teams across the organization need a platform that enables them to harness that shift safely, consistently, and at speed. We've hired our Lead Platform Engineer - a hands-on builder who will be in the code daily, building right alongside you. Now we need a second strong engineer to double the team's output and accelerate the mission. The mission is enablement. Every team that touches infrastructure should move faster because of what we build: golden-path pipelines that eliminate guesswork, Terraform modules that encode best practices, security guardrails built in rather than bolted on, and AI-powered workflows that eliminate toil and accelerate decision-making. When we do our job well, teams iterate faster, ship more reliably, operate more securely, and have full transparency into their infrastructure. This is an AI-forward position. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone genuinely excited to apply AI tooling and agentic patterns to infrastructure automation, delivery workflows, and operational excellence - as a daily multiplier, not a checkbox.

The Specifics of the Role

• Everything you build has one measure: did it make teams faster, more reliable, more secure, and more transparent?
• Build and ship Terraform modules alongside the lead - reusable building blocks that let teams provision infrastructure quickly, consistently, and without reinventing patterns.
• Build IaC testing and validation frameworks (Terratest, checkov, tflint) so consuming teams trust modules implicitly and move fast with confidence.
• Write clear module documentation and self-service guides so teams adopt capabilities independently.
• Build and ship GitHub Actions workflows - golden-path patterns giving teams a fast, proven, secure path from commit to production.
• Implement pipeline guardrails - linting, secret scanning, testing gates, approvals, deployment safety - speed and safety in one path.
• Own pipeline reliability and drive adoption: monitor, troubleshoot, work directly with teams, capture friction, and feed learnings back into improvements.
• Integrate AI tooling (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, agent frameworks) into your daily work and into platform capabilities - a multiplier for your productivity and every consuming team's.
• Build AI-assisted automation into delivery and operations – intelligent PR generation, code review assistance, AI-powered incident triage, runbook execution.
• Explore and prototype agentic AI patterns alongside the lead – workflow engines, autonomous tasks, and intelligent automation. Champion AI adoption across consuming teams.
• Implement security scanning (tfsec, checkov, Trivy) in CI/CD so security is built into delivery, not a gate that slows teams down.
• Build Datadog dashboards, monitors, and alerts as code – transparent, real-time visibility into infrastructure health and pipeline performance.
• Create developer documentation, onboarding guides, and runbooks that make the platform self-service. Support container workloads (Kubernetes/Docker) as the platform expands.

Requirements

• Terraform hands-on experience (2+ years): modules, state management, workspace patterns.
• CI/CD pipeline experience: GitHub Actions preferred; Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, or Jenkins transfers well.
• Cloud platform familiarity – Azure or AWS (Azure preferred): real workloads, core services, networking, IAM.
• Scripting and automation: clean Python, Bash, or PowerShell to automate tasks and eliminate toil.
• Testing and quality mindset: comfortable with or eager to learn Terratest, checkov, tflint, or similar. Git proficiency with branching strategies, PR workflows, and daily code review.
• AI-forward mindset: actively using AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude) as daily multipliers, excited to build AI-assisted workflows into platform capabilities.
• Enablement orientation: you measure success by whether teams are faster and more self-sufficient because of what you built.
• Security scanning tools (tfsec, checkov, Trivy, Snyk)
• Datadog or equivalent observability platform
• Kubernetes / Docker (container ops, Helm, cluster maintenance)
• Ansible or configuration management tools
• Agentic AI or workflow automation (n8n, LangChain, or similar)
• Networking fundamentals or developer portals (Backstage, mkdocs)

Some Things You Should Know

• No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
• We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
• The pace is fast!
• This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.

Why Clayco?

• 2025 Best Places to Work – St. Louis Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Phoenix Business Journal.
• 2025 ENR Top 400 – Top Data Center Contractor (Top 3).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Design-Build Firms – Design-Build Contractor (Top 5).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Green Contractors – Green Contractor (Top 3).

Benefits

• Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance.
• Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!

Compensation

• The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.