Senior Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

Why choose between doing meaningful work and having a fulfilling life? At MITRE, you can have both. That's because MITRE people are committed to tackling our nation's toughest challenges—and we're committed to the long-term well-being of our employees. MITRE is different from most technology companies. We are a not-for-profit corporation chartered to work for the public interest, with no commercial conflicts to influence what we do. The R&D centers we operate for the government create lasting impact in fields as diverse as cybersecurity, healthcare, aviation, defense, and enterprise transformation. We're making a difference every day—working for a safer, healthier, and more secure nation and world. Our workplace reflects our values. We offer competitive benefits, exceptional professional development opportunities for career growth, and a culture of innovation that embraces adaptability, collaboration, technical excellence, and people in partnership. If this sounds like the choice you want to make, then choose MITRE - and make a difference with us.

MITRE Mission Computing is a new organization that bridges the gap between Mission and Technology and helps enable MITRE projects to focus on their work, without worrying about compliance and the underlying platform infrastructure. We apply new technologies that can address the Government's most challenging Systems Engineering problems. This is an opportunity for experienced platform engineers who are highly motivated, innovative, and proactive and interested in owning and maintaining their work to enable the rest of MITRE and sponsors.

Roles & Responsibilities:

MITRE Mission Computing is seeking a Platform Engineer to own and evolve the foundational systems that enable critical national security work across MITRE's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. This is a broad, high-ownership role at the intersection of Kubernetes platform engineering and cloud infrastructure. You will be responsible for the reliability and security of the compute platforms that power internal tools and the development and production environments that enable engineering, research, and mission teams to move faster with confidence, while guiding those teams on how best to adopt and utilize what you provide.

You will operate in a high-stakes environment defined by novel problems and real constraints, including CMMC compliance, high availability, and cyber resilience. In this environment you will provide the platforms that enable engineering teams of varying skill maturities to deliver innovative solutions and AI-enabled capabilities to MITRE's U.S. government sponsors.

If you are energized by solving hard problems at scale, prefer deep technical ownership over narrow specialization, and want your engineering decisions to have lasting impact, we would like to hear from you.

Basic Qualifications:

• Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 3 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with relevant experience who can immediately contribute at this job step; or equivalent of related education and work experience.
• Bachelor's degree in software engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 5 years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent) with demonstrated hands-on experience designing, building, operating, and evolving production Kubernetes platforms (cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, observability, and security) or equivalent internal platform infrastructure.
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience (preferably AWS, including GovCloud or other regulated environments)
• Experience with multi-cluster, multi-tenant, or hybrid-cloud Kubernetes architectures
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent) and GitOps practices
• Experience authoring and operating CI/CD pipelines that support platform and application workloads, including integration with Infrastructure as Code and GitOps workflows
• Demonstrated ability to build reliable, secure compute platforms that other engineering teams depend on
• Demonstrated experience with incident management, including participation in on-call rotations (e.g., PagerDuty) and driving post-incident reviews
• Experience hardening systems for compliance requirements (e.g., CMMC, FedRAMP, or similar frameworks)
• Ability to work effectively amid novel problems, shifting constraints, and multi-stakeholders
• Strong communication skills with the ability to guide and influence engineering teams on platform best practices
• Deep experience operating mixed Linux and Windows environments at scale, including cross-platform identity, security controls, and platform services that support both ecosystems
• Hands-on experience with monitoring, alerting, and observability stacks (e.g., Grafana, Loki, Alloy, and related logging pipelines), including integration with incident management tools
• Experience operating platforms that engineering teams rely on to take workloads into production, including supporting their use of platform-provided monitoring, alerting, and incident management capabilities
• Strong communication skills with demonstrated experience briefing senior government or senior customer stakeholders on status, critical decisions, and technical recommendations
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Secret U.S Government issued Security Clearance . Per the U.S. Government's eligibility requirements, you must be a U.S Citizen to be considered for a security clearance.
• This position requires a minimum of 3 days per week on-site in McLean, VA, Bedford, MA, San Diego, CA or Colorado Springs, CO

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with including service mesh, network policy enforcement, policy-as-code, runtime security detection, and automated response with multi-cluster, multi-tenant, or hybrid-cloud Kubernetes architectures
• Experience operating platforms in CMMC or high-side environments
• Demonstrated experience taking software from development into production and supporting it under real customer utilization
• Background building internal developer platforms, self-service interfaces, or abstractions that improve team velocity
• Familiarity with AI/ML workloads, GPU orchestration, or enabling AI-enabled capabilities on shared platforms
• Prior work supporting national security, DoD, or other U.S. government sponsors
• Deep knowledge of container security, policy-as-code, and zero-trust patterns
• Track record of driving CVE remediation at scale across container platforms and virtual machines, with the ability to analyze underlying CWEs to prevent recurring classes of weaknesses
• Track record of mentoring or enabling other teams to effectively utilize shared platforms
• Experience improving incident response processes, reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR), or leading reliability initiatives
• Experience designing and operating platforms where tenant teams own their application-level incident response and vulnerability mitigation, while the platform team owns the underlying reliability, observability, and escalation paths
• Track record of enabling other teams to confidently operate their services in production through clear platform interfaces, runbooks, and shared incident management practices
• Active Secret Clearance

Salary compensation range and midpoint:

$129,200 - $161,500 - $193,800 Annual

Work Location Type:

Onsite

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. Commitment to Non-Discrimination

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state, local or international law.

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