Lead Platform Engineer

LOCATION:

Mclean, VA, Richmond, VA or NYC

Engineering | Platform Engineering | Hybrid (US)

U.S. Citizenship Required

We're looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to be the technical lead for our largest, most cross-cutting platform programs. This is work that spans multiple engineering teams, has many stakeholders, and carries real security, compliance, and reliability risk across commercial AWS and our FedRAMP-authorized environments in AWS Gov Cloud. The strongest candidates are excellent technical leaders who are also great to work with.

At this level, your impact comes as much from sound judgment, clear communication, and the trust of other teams as from deep AWS and Kubernetes expertise. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports. You'll lead through technical judgment and by making the engineers around you better.

• Lead large, cross-team platform programs such as multi-region EKS, Gov Cloud platform expansion, or a re-architecture of the IaC framework, from design through delivery.
• Make and own architecture decisions across compute, network topology, identity, account structure, and delivery, and document the tradeoffs clearly.
• Reduce complexity across platform services and processes by consolidating one-off patterns, retiring what's no longer needed, and helping teams do more with less.
• Design enterprise IaC frameworks and multi-region CI/CD with approval gates, automated rollback, and policy enforcement.
• Architect guardrails and developer tooling so that every engineer can work safely in FedRAMP and Gov Cloud environments.
• Design DR, capacity, and resilience strategies with explicit RTO/RPO targets, and validate them under sustained load, failure injection, and chaos testing.
• Partner with product, data, and AI/ML teams to design platform infrastructure that fits how those teams build and run their systems.
• Communicate plans, risks, and tradeoffs to engineers, security, compliance, federal program teams, and business stakeholders. Surface risks early and manage cross-team dependencies.
• Own on-call escalation paths, lead the hardest incidents, and drive improvements to incident response across the teams the platform serves.
• Set platform best practices and quality standards that other teams adopt, including IaC testing, policy tests, and failure testing in CI.
• Shape how the platform team adopts AI-assisted engineering tools, with clear validation standards and boundaries that respect federal compliance requirements.
• Mentor and coach engineers across teams, delegate meaningful work, and help raise the hiring bar for platform roles.

• A track record as the technical lead on large, cross-team infrastructure or platform programs with many stakeholders.
• Advanced, production-proven depth in AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, and CI/CD, including architecture decisions that other teams had to live with.
• Excellent judgment on architecture across many aspects of a project, with the reasoning and rejected alternatives to show for it.
• Concrete examples of reducing complexity in systems or processes, with measurable outcomes.
• Experience translating FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, and SOC 2 requirements into automated, enforceable controls with continuous evidence.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including design proposals, decision records, and incident reviews, and the ability to explain tradeoffs to engineers, auditors, and business leaders.
• Evidence of growing other engineers through mentoring, coaching, and delegation.
• Strong Python or Go skills for platform tooling and automation.
• Typically 10+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years as a technical lead on cross-team programs. We calibrate on demonstrated scope and judgment, not tenure.
• U.S. citizenship, required for access to Exiger's FedRAMP federal environments where legally required.

• Experience with one or more of the following is a plus:
• Leading or playing a central role in a FedRAMP authorization, continuous monitoring program, or SOC 2 Type II audit
• AWS Gov Cloud, including partition isolation and service parity constraints
• AWS Professional or Specialty certifications, CKA/CKS, or Hashi Corp Terraform certification
• Internal developer platforms or developer portals (Backstage or equivalent)
• Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) and container supply chain security
• Hashi Corp Vault at scale
• Chaos engineering (AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, Litmus)
• Fin Ops and automated cost controls
• Infrastructure for data…