Principal Platform & Infrastructure Engineer

We are building a modern orchestration platform to replace a legacy system of ad-hoc scripts that coordinate long-running, resource-intensive compute jobs across on-premises HPC/HTC infrastructure and cloud environments. The platform must give engineers clear visibility into multi-day job pipelines, respond intelligently to failures, and scale compute capacity elastically between on-prem hardware and the cloud during peak demand.

This is a foundational, greenfield build. You will be the senior-most voice on infrastructure, security, and platform architecture, working closely with a software/application engineer who owns the orchestration logic and application-layer design. You'll set the technical direction for how the platform is deployed, secured, and operated — establishing patterns the rest of the team will follow, rather than discovering them through trial and error.

We are intentionally vague here about the specific domain and tooling; the technical depth and architectural challenges are what matter, and we'll cover the specifics in interview.

You will:

• Own the end-to-end platform architecture: from bare-metal/hypervisor layer through networking, cloud, and orchestration infrastructure.
• Design and implement the on-prem virtualization layer (e.g. Proxmox or equivalent) supporting compute clusters, control-plane services, and developer/test environments.
• Design hybrid cloud architecture (primarily Azure) including compute bursting strategy, cost controls, and workload placement between on-prem and cloud.
• Architect network topology: subnet design, VLAN segmentation, firewall rules, DMZ boundaries, and secure ingress/egress between on-prem HPC/HTC resources, cloud environments, and external services.
• Design and implement identity, authentication, and authorization: RBAC models, service accounts, SSO/federation, least-privilege access policies across platform components.
• Own secrets management strategy (e.g. Vault, Azure Key Vault, or equivalent) and ensure secrets are never hard-coded or leaked into logs/artifacts.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and configuration management (Ansible) to make environment provisioning repeatable, auditable, and version-controlled.
• Define and enforce security baselines: patching cadence, vulnerability scanning, network hardening, audit logging.
• Partner with the application development lead to define clean interfaces between infrastructure concerns (deployment, secrets, networking) and application logic (workflow/task design).
• Act as a technical mentor across the team on infrastructure and security topics — you are expected to unblock others quickly by applying established patterns, not by re-deriving them from scratch.
• Participate in incident response and capacity planning for production workloads.
• Evaluate and make build-vs-buy decisions for infrastructure tooling.

Committed to making your customers, stakeholders and colleagues successful, you’re an excellent communicator, listener and collaborator who builds trusted partnerships by delivering what you say, when you say. You’re curious, solutions orientated and a world-class problem solver who constantly seeks opportunities to innovate and achieve the best possible outcome to the highest imaginable standard.

You will have:

• Extensive experience in infrastructure/platform engineering, with demonstrable ownership of production systems end-to-end.
• Deep hands-on experience with on-prem virtualization from bare metal (e.g. Proxmox, VMware, or similar hypervisor platforms) — not just cloud-only experience.
• Strong production experience…