Hardware Infrastructure Engineer II

Location: New York

CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 43 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences.

As CLEAR continues to expand its identity platform across physical and digital environments, our network of kiosks and connected devices forms the backbone of our member experience. Ensuring these systems stay secure, reliable, and always available is mission-critical, and that’s where you come in.

We’re looking for a Platform Engineer to join our Hardware Operations and Platform Engineering team. You’ll be sitting at the intersection of Site Reliability Engineer and Embedded Systems Integration. You’ll be architecting and maintaining the software layer that keeps thousands of Linux-based kiosks online, healthy, and self-healing, effectively operating a distributed server fleet at the edge.

You’ll own everything from OS image management to over-the-air (OTA) updates, device observability, and system recovery, while ensuring our biometric kiosks deliver a consistent, frictionless experience to every traveler, every time.

What You Will Do Architect and implement OS-level watchdogs, process monitors, and self-healing mechanisms to ensure devices automatically recover from failures (service restarts, reboots, or rollbacks).Manage and enhance our OTA update framework to enable safe, atomic updates via A/B partition swapping and automated rollback when needed.

Develop and maintain Python-based services that interact with connected peripherals (payment terminals, scanners, sensors) via vendor SDKs and serial interfaces.

Own and maintain our custom Linux image (via Yocto, Buildroot, bootc, rpm-ostree, etc), managing systemd units, udev rules, and security policies for a locked-down, production-grade environment.

Build lightweight monitoring agents to stream logs, metrics, and telemetry (connectivity, performance, temperature) to centralized observability systems such as Datadog or Splunk.

Work closely with software, SRE, and field operations teams to identify pain points and develop scalable solutions that improve reliability and ease of maintenance.

Who You Are 3+ years of hands-on experience administering embedded Linux systems

Strong proficiency in Python for system automation, service orchestration, and hardware communication.

Familiarity with A/B update mechanisms (RAUC, Mender, SWUpdate, or custom partition-switching logic).Experienced in serial communications (UART, RS-232, USB-serial) and SDK-based hardware integration.

Deep knowledge of service dependencies, timers, and watchdog configuration.

Familiarity with network observability and remote device management at fleet scale.

Committed to operational excellence, focused on designing for resilience, testability, and safe rollback.

Collaborative, pragmatic, and curious; equally comfortable debugging a kiosk in the field or improving CI/CD for edge devices.

Why You’ll Love This Role Massive impact:
Your work ensures millions of travelers experience CLEAR’s identity platform without disruption.

Unique technical challenge:
Operate and scale a distributed edge infrastructure at the intersection of IoT and reliability engineering.

End-to-end ownership:
From OS image to telemetry pipeline, you’ll own the full stack of machine reliability.

Collaborative culture:
Deep cross-functional partnership with engineering and operations experts to create frictionless identity experiences.

Continuous learning:
Work on modern Linux, OTA…