Staff Platform Engineer

Position: Staff Platform Engineer Employment Type: Full-Time Work Arrangement: Primarily Remote Position Summary Zip Zap IT is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer with 5+ years experience to provide senior technical leadership in the design, development, and operation of an enterprise automated testing platform supporting Federal Student Aid (FSA). The Staff Platform Engineer will establish the technical foundation that enables application teams across the enterprise to adopt automated testing through self-service tooling, CI/CD integration, automated quality gates, observability, reusable engineering patterns, and reliable platform services. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The successful candidate will combine strong platform and DevSecOps engineering skills with the ability to establish scalable technical patterns and guide other engineers toward their adoption. Key Responsibilities Provide technical leadership for the architecture, development, and operation of the enterprise automated testing platform. Design and implement platform capabilities that enable application teams to consume automated testing services through self-service patterns. Design and maintain CI/CD integrations supporting automated test execution, quality gates, standards enforcement, and release-readiness checks. Develop reusable platform patterns, templates, utilities, and reference implementations for application teams. Establish automated mechanisms for enforcing or encouraging enterprise testing standards, including pipeline checks, repository scanning, pull-request checks, metadata validation, and automated controls. Integrate testing capabilities with enterprise observability, monitoring, alerting, issue-tracking, and reporting platforms. Design for platform scalability, reliability, maintainability, security, and operational support. Support infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, automated deployment, and environment readiness capabilities. Establish technical approaches for platform monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, incident response, and operational support. Contribute to the design and implementation of test orchestration, test-data automation, performance-testing, and release-readiness capabilities. Work closely with the Staff Backend Engineer and other senior engineers to establish consistent architectural patterns across platform services. Evaluate technical dependencies, risks, tradeoffs, and integration requirements and communicate recommendations to technical and Government stakeholders. Establish and maintain technical documentation, architecture diagrams, runbooks, deployment procedures, and system-operation artifacts. Support security, privacy, compliance, and authorization activities associated with the testing platform. Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance on platform engineering, DevSecOps, automation, and operational practices. Participate in Agile planning, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demonstrations, retrospectives, and technical reviews. Support application-team onboarding and enablement by developing reusable implementation patterns and technical guidance. Contribute to transition-in and transition-out activities, including knowledge transfer and documentation. Required Qualifications Demonstrated experience designing, developing, and operating software platforms or shared engineering capabilities. Strong experience with CI/CD automation and modern DevSecOps practices. Experience designing automated deployment and build processes. Experience with infrastructure automation and infrastructure-as-code. Experience with cloud-based or distributed application environments. Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, reliability, and operational support. Experience integrating multiple enterprise systems and development platforms. Experience designing secure, scalable, maintainable technical architectures. Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across an engineering team. Experience working in Agile software development environments. Strong technical communication and documentation skills. Desired Qualifications Experience building an internal developer platform, testing platform, or engineering enablement platform. Experience with GitLab and GitLab CI/CD. Experience with Datadog or comparable observability platforms. Experience with automated testing infrastructure and test orchestration. Experience implementing automated quality gates and engineering standards enforcement. Experience with repository scanning, pull-request checks, automated validation, or policy-as-code approaches. Experience with containers and container orchestration. Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code tools. Experience supporting performance, scalability, and reliability testing. Experience with security scanning and DevSecOps controls. Federal government or other highly regulated enterprise IT experience. recblid jwjjyno8nt0ympzyf2uxtrkursis5u ZipZap IT Solutions