Platform Engineer, Platform Development

Position: Staff Platform Engineer, Platform Development
Simple sense builds, deploys, and sustains the Installation Resilience Platform that enables mission operators to rapidly adapt and respond. The Platform protects critical infrastructure from cyber attack while unlocking previously siloed information to monitor, diagnose, and improve response times to incidents. Our adversaries rapidly adopt the latest technology: we help defense users respond in kind.

Simple sense is a non-traditional defense contractor and prime on the Air Force's Installation Resilience Operations Command and Control (IROC) program, which is now expanding to five additional Air Force, Space Force, and Army installations from the one prototype installation, Tyndall Air Force Base.

Our team combines over 100 years of direct mission experience solving hard problems with 50 years technical expertise deploying Dev Sec Ops , cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure, giving us a deep appreciation for our customers' mission and end users' priorities. We build for scale, architecting and prioritizing technical work for long term sustainability.

Staff Platform Engineer, Platform Development

Location: Denver, CO (Hybrid), San Antonio, TX (Hybrid), Brooklyn, NY or Remote (US Based)
About the Role

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will play a critical role in owning the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of the operational platform. Simple sense enables rapid decision-making and data visualization for critical infrastructure through a combination of on-premise and cloud services. The Platform Team has primary responsibility for cloud infrastructure, application hosting, user access and authorization and security tooling among other features.

You will oversee the end-to-end success of core platform components-from cloud network architecture to performance and reliability-and partner closely with the Product and Operations teams to remove ambiguity and ensure our platform remains resilient, secure, and ready for the mission.

Work Model: We prioritize candidates in the Denver, CO, San Antonio, TX, and Brooklyn, NY area, but are open to remote talent.

Locals: 2 days/week onsite.

Remote: Quarterly travel for team meetings.
What Success Looks Like:

30 Days: Onboard, audit current platform workflows, and establish relationships with cross-functional Product and Engineering leads.

60 Days: Provide technical contributions to existing projects and develop a full understanding of the existing and planned platform development efforts.

90 Days: Identify opportunities to improve reliability, performance, security and/or development workflows and take a technical leadership role in forming the Platform technical roadmap.
What You'll Do

• End-to-End Technical Ownership: Serve as a technical owner for the success of platform development projects, from initial concept evaluation and design to final delivery and maintenance. Responsibilities will span new feature development and integration, cloud network architecture updates and implementation of performance and reliability improvements.
• Internal and External Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional Development, Product, and Operations teams, as well as external vendors, to ensure the platform meets stability, security, and scalability requirements on operational timelines.
• Technical Leadership: Work with Engineering and Product leadership to ensure clear, actionable and achievable plans that span the organization.
• System Design & Architecture: Lead planning sessions, create design documents, and make high-level technical decisions for core platform components (e.g., infrastructure-as-code, deployment pipelines, operational reliability, security controls, and disaster recovery planning).
• Force Multiplier & Mentorship: Elevate the entire team by establishing best practices, conducting insightful code reviews, and unblocking teammates who are stuck, prioritizing the team's output over individual coding tasks.
• Technical Contributor: Provide hands-on technical contributions for the most critical or demanding parts of the project, setting the technical pattern and standard for others, with a healthy time allocation of approximately 60% on solving technical problems (coding, design, reviews).
• Team & Process Improvement: Dedicate time (approx. 40%) to planning, cross-team communication, defining scope with Product Owners, breaking down work, and identifying/fixing process issues (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, testing standards for platform components).

What You Bring

Required Qualifications:

Experience: 7-15 years of professional experience building and delivering scalable, secure, and reliable systems and cloud services.

Technical Skill:

• Deep expertise in AWS systems, resources and best practices (ex: EC2, SSM, databases, scaling strategies, resilient architectures)
• Experience with AWS Cloud formation infrastructure automation (Terraform or Cloud Formation), cloud networking and proficiency in NodeJS or Python.
• AWS cloud networking experience (ex: VPCs, subnets, Route
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