Platform Engineer

At Atomic Canyon, our vision is to unlock endless energy. We are pioneering the development of safe, efficient, open-source AI models tailored for nuclear data and content. In collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, our cutting-edge AI technology processes nuclear terminology with unmatched precision, positioning us to solve complex challenges in nuclear energy.

Our mission is to harness AI to power nuclear progress, starting with our flagship product, Neutron — a generative AI search solution for nuclear energy plants. By simplifying access to vast documentation, enhancing data accessibility, and streamlining workflows, we’re using advanced AI to address critical climate and energy challenges — and revitalize the nuclear energy sector.

Atomic Canyon was founded in 2023 by Trey Lauderdale, who previously led Voalte (acquired for $180MM). Learn more about us .

About the Role

Atomic Canyon is looking for a Platform Engineer to join our team. You will design, build, and operate the infrastructure that runs Neutron for nuclear utilities, national labs, and international agencies. That means Kubernetes in our own cloud tenants, in customer-owned cloud tenants, and on bare metal inside plant networks, each with its own security posture and constraints.

This is a role for someone who treats security as an architecture problem rather than a checklist. Our customers run some of the most heavily regulated infrastructure in the country, and their security teams review ours in detail. You will be designing egress controls, identity federation, and network boundaries that hold up to that scrutiny, and you will be a direct participant in customer security reviews.

We are a small team, so the surface area is wide and the autonomy is real. You will own systems end to end rather than filing tickets against someone else’s.

What You Will Do and Achieve

• Design, deploy, and operate containerized Kubernetes workloads across Azure (AKS in commercial and government regions), customer-owned cloud tenants, and on-premises bare metal (k3s/RKE2) inside plant networks
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Helm, with GitOps delivery through ArgoCD
• Design and implement the security architecture of our deployments: network segmentation and egress control, WAF and ingress policy, TLS and certificate automation, Kubernetes RBAC and pod-level controls, and secrets handling
• Operate the data and identity layer: OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, Keycloak (including federating authentication to customer identity providers), and RabbitMQ
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions
• Own observability across environments with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki, including alerting that engineers actually act on
• Support GPU and LLM serving infrastructure, including inference workloads and model gateway configuration
• Provide on-call production support, manage environment health, and run incident response through to a written postmortem
• Work with customer IT, cyber security, and compliance teams through deployment, security review, and questionnaire cycles
• Contribute to our SOC 2 program: implement and operate controls, produce evidence, and remediate vulnerability and penetration test findings within SLA
• Collaborate with product and application engineers to architect infrastructure for new capabilities

Who You Are

• 5+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure or platform engineering
• Production Kubernetes experience, including troubleshooting a cluster you did not build
• Depth in at least one major cloud provider, with Azure strongly preferred; comfort working across providers

Key Knowledge and Skills

• Strong proficiency with Docker, Helm, and Kubernetes deployment tooling
• Expertise in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, plus GitOps practice with ArgoCD or Flux
• Solid networking fundamentals: DNS, TLS, ingress and load balancing, firewall and security group policy, private connectivity
• Practical security engineering judgment: least privilege, defense in depth, secrets management, and the ability to explain a design decision to a skeptical security reviewer
• Working knowledge of identity and access protocols (OIDC, SAML) and federated authentication
• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling for containerized environments
• Linux systems administration and experience provisioning bare metal servers with tools like iDRAC
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Excellent written communication; much of this job is explaining infrastructure to people who do not build it
• Willingness to travel to client sites and for in-person company meetings

Nice to Have

• Experience working in a SOC 2 environment: operating controls day to day, collecting evidence in a compliance platform such as Vanta or Drata, and working with auditors
• Experience deploying into a customer’s own cloud tenant or an air-gapped / network-isolated environment
• Azure Government, AWS GovCloud, or other regulated and sovereign cloud experience
• Background in a regulated industry such as nuclear, healthcare, defense, finance, or critical infrastructure
• GPU infrastructure and LLM serving experience (vLLM, model gateways, capacity and quota planning)
• Experience running search or vector database infrastructure at scale
• Familiarity with Cloudflare (DNS, Zero Trust, Pages, Workers)
• Incident management practice using a tool such as incident.io or PagerDuty, including severity schemes and postmortem culture
• Competitive salary of $150,000–$200,000 annually
• Equity in the company
• Fully remote work environment
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance covered at 100% for employees
• Empowering, flexible work environment that supports both professional goals and individual passions
• Professional development opportunities, including conference attendance and training programs
• Chance to make a significant impact on the future of clean energy
• Quarterly travel to rotating US destinations for in-person company meetings

Export Control Notice

This position requires access to information and/or technologies subject to Department of Energy (DOE) export control restrictions. Only U.S. citizens who are at least 18 years of age are eligible for the security clearance required for this role. Selected candidates will be required to provide acceptable documentation of U.S. citizenship and must successfully complete a background investigation before being granted access to export-controlled information.

If you are a Platform Engineer who enjoys owning infrastructure end to end and wants that work to matter, we would like to hear from you. You would be building the systems that put decades of nuclear operating knowledge in front of the people keeping plants running safely.

Atomic Canyon is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals who share our passion for innovation in nuclear energy and AI.