Senior Platform Engineer; IT Services

Position: Senior Platform Engineer (IT Services)
About Charles River Associates For over 50 years, Charles River Associates has been a premier consulting firm that offers employees a place to learn from a diverse group of consultants, industry experts, and academics. At CRA you will be exposed to leading minds who use economic, financial, and business analysis to solve complex world problems for an impressive roster of clients, including major law firms, Fortune 100 companies, and government agencies.

Through a collegial environment, formal and informal training opportunities, and a broad array of professional development resources, your experience at CRA will open doors for you throughout your career.

Position Overview The Information Technology (ITS) department at Charles River Associates is currently a team of more than 40 professionals dedicated to enhancing, maintaining, and developing the firm's technology infrastructure and security based in offices around the globe. The team is comprised of four functions:
Service Delivery & Telecom, Enterprise Application Solutions, Infrastructure, Networking and Cloud Solutions, Information Security. Primarily a Microsoft house, CRA is looking to maximize the performance of our on-premise systems and hybrid infrastructure, meaning experience with cloud technologies is essential for this role. The Senior Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and continuously improving the firm's hybrid infrastructure platforms spanning on-premises datacenters and public cloud environments.

This role focuses on platform engineering practices, automation, infrastructure-as-code, and operational excellence to deliver scalable, secure, and self-service infrastructure services.

The engineer will partner closely with cloud, networking, security, automation, and application teams to create reusable platform capabilities, automate infrastructure lifecycle management, and enable modernization initiatives across the enterprise. This position plays a key role in advancing CRA's hybrid cloud strategy through platform standardization, governance, observability, cost optimization, and automation-first operational practices. Primary responsibilities include:

Platform Engineering & Service Enablement Design, build, and maintain hybrid infrastructure platforms supporting public cloud and on-premises environments.

Develop reusable platform services that enable self-service provisioning and standardized infrastructure deployment.

Establish platform standards, golden images, reference architectures, and engineering guardrails.

Contribute to enterprise platform roadmaps and modernization initiatives.

Infrastructure Automation & IaCDevelop and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Terraform, Terraform Cloud, Bicep, Ansible, and automation frameworks.

Build automation workflows for provisioning, compliance validation, lifecycle management, patching, backup, and disaster recovery.

Develop reusable infrastructure modules and automation pipelines following Dev Ops and Platform Engineering principles.

Cloud-enabled Operations & Support:
Engineer and optimize hybrid cloud environments across VMware Cloud Foundation, Azure, AWS, and future cloud platforms.

Support a “Cloud Landing Zone” architecture pattern.

Assist with workload discovery and migration readiness activities, then execute migration tasks (e.g., provisioning, cutovers, validation) for workloads moving to multi-cloud strategy.

Infrastructure optimization and improve day-day management of on-premises compute, storage, and virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere) that would introduce efficiencies thru automated workflows.

Experience managing a Cloud-enabled Identity and Directory Services implementing and maintaining Active Directory/Azure AD integration…