Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

Ballston, VA

NALEJ is building NALEJ OS, an AI-native, enterprise open-source developer platform for what we call the three D's:develop, deploy, and day 2 operations. It covers the whole software lifecycle on one platform, from cloud to edge: teams write code, ship it, and run it in production. We build dual-use technology across Dev Sec Ops , Data Sec Ops , AI/ML Ops, Cyber Ops, and Network Ops for defense and commercial customers.

We deliver it as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, hybrid, and air-gapped deployments. Security is built in, including secure edge networks and compliance with IL4–IL6, SAP, MOSA, NIST, and Zero Trust standards.

The platform team builds and operates NALEJ OS, a production multi-cluster Kubernetes platform that serves multiple customer tenants. We own the full stack: cloud infrastructure, clusters, the service mesh, Git Ops delivery, and the web applications tenants use every day.

We're an AI-first startup, and we build that way. Every engineer works with AI agents every day, using context files, custom agents, and shared memory tuned to our platform. You'll work with the newest tools as they come out. You'll build AI workflows that automate work people used to do by hand. You'll also ship entire features yourself, with agents working alongside you.

Our team is small, so good ideas move from conversation to production fast, and nobody waits for permission to own something.

We're looking for generalists. In one day you might write infrastructure code in the morning, debug cross-cluster routing at lunch, and build an agent workflow before you log off. Depth in one area is great, but the job is ownership across all of them, and there's plenty of room to grow into whatever interests you most.

• Design, build, and operate cloud infrastructure as code across multiple accounts and environments.
• Run multi-cluster Kubernetes in production. This covers cluster and node lifecycle, upgrades, access control, admission policy, and custom resources.
• Automate environment creation end to end, so standing up a new customer environment takes as little human involvement as possible.

• Own the path from commit to production: CI pipelines, image builds, rendered configuration, and Git Ops sync.
• Build safe promotion between environments, including progressive delivery with automated rollback driven by metrics.
• Build AI-driven workflows that take over the release and promotion work engineers still do by hand.

• Operate the service mesh, including cross-cluster routing, mutual TLS, and traffic isolation between tenants.
• Build zero-trust controls into the platform: policy enforcement, certificate management, workload identity, secrets management, and runtime threat detection.
• Maintain the authentication chain that protects platform and tenant applications, from the identity provider through the auth proxy.

• Maintain metrics, logs, and alerting across every cluster.
• Build agents that read those signals, triage problems, and propose fixes.

• Shape how the team works with AI. Design new agents, skills, and workflows, then roll them out to the rest of the team.
• Help ship AI features into the product itself.
• Build and improve the internal tools that make the whole team faster.
• Take platform initiatives from design to delivery. Manage scope, dependencies, and timelines, and work with product, application, and test engineers early so new features fit the platform cleanly.

• 3+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, Dev Ops, or SRE work.
• Experience with infrastructure as code using tools…