Principal Platform Engineer

LTS

$150K — $180K *
US-AnywhereRemote in United States
Enterprise Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, plus 10 years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience.
  • Proven experience managing on-call responsibilities for production systems designed by the candidate.
  • Decade-plus experience with production cloud platforms essential for the role.
  • In-depth knowledge of AWS and strong infrastructure-as-code skills with CDK or Terraform.
  • Experience with identity and access design including SAML/OIDC and federated identity systems.
  • Ability to work under regulatory pressures translating control catalogs into infrastructure designs.
  • Demonstrated experience in a remote work environment.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architectural frameworks for various platform components on AWS.
  • Ensure security compliance for federal identity standards in the platform design.
  • Facilitate architectural portability for deployments in restricted environments.
  • Enhance internal developer experiences focusing on logging, tracing, and deployment speed.
  • Be accountable for system reliability and perform postmortems on outages.
  • Translate and implement regulatory requirements into actionable infrastructure decisions.
  • Collaborate with deployment teams for smooth transitions to restricted environments.

Benefits

  • Support high visibility federal missions in IT and healthcare.
  • A culture focused on innovation, growth, collaboration, and quality.
  • Access to cutting-edge tools and technologies.
  • Comprehensive benefits for employees and their families.
  • Clear career advancement opportunities based on ambition and performance.
Full Job Description
What You'll Do:

The Principal Platform Engineer owns the architectural shape of the platform on commercial AWS. Infrastructure decisions compound and are hard to undo, so this role calls for someone with real production experience: outages they caused, audits they sat through, identity bugs they debugged at 2am.
  • Own the architectural shape of the platform - VPC, managed PostgreSQL, serverless compute, object storage, observability, CI/CD, defined as code.
  • Own the security and compliance shape so federal identity standards (SSO, smart-card, federated identity) plug in cleanly when the platform moves into restricted environments: encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, identity abstraction, tenant isolation, data residency primitives.
  • Own architectural portability so deployment in regulated or restricted environments is straightforward when the time comes.
  • Own internal developer experience - logs, traces, deploy speed, the local dev loop.
  • Be on call for systems you designed; own the postmortem when things break.
  • Translate regulatory pressure (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2, ITAR, or comparable control catalogs) into concrete infrastructure decisions.
  • Partner with downstream deployment teams on the handoff into restricted environments.

What We're Looking For:
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, plus 10 years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience; equivalent experience may substitute for the degree requirement.
  • Has been on call for production systems they personally designed and can talk in detail about an outage they caused, an audit they sat through, or an identity bug they debugged past 4am.
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
  • Decade-plus on production cloud platforms; years of experience matter for this role specifically.
  • Hands-on AWS depth; strong infrastructure-as-code (CDK or Terraform).
  • Identity and access design - SAML/OIDC, federated identity, identity abstraction patterns.
  • Has worked under regulatory pressure (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2, ITAR, or similar) and can read a control catalog and translate it into infrastructure decisions, even without having driven a full accreditation.
  • Designs for portability - environments other than the one personally operated in.
  • Heavy native use of AI tooling: agents in parallel, model as collaborator.
  • Strong observability discipline - logs, traces, deploy speed, the local dev loop.
  • Demonstrated experience in a remote work environment.

Nice to Have:
  • GovCloud, FedRAMP, or restricted-environment deployment experience.
  • Multi-tenant SaaS architecture.
  • Sovereign cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped deployments.
  • Accreditation experience - having driven or contributed to a federal authorization.
  • HIPAA/HITECH operational experience.
  • Open-source contributions in the platform, infrastructure-as-code, or identity space.


What's in it for you?
  • The opportunity to support high visibility federal missions in IT and healthcare
  • A culture that values innovation, growth, collaboration, and quality
  • Access to cutting-edge tools and technologies
  • Comprehensive benefits for you and your family
  • A career path that rewards ambition and performance


If you're ready to push boundaries, sharpen your skills, and join a team that is passionate about building what's next, we'd love to meet you. Apply today and let's build a future together!

LTS shares salary ranges to promote transparency. Compensation ranges are provided for informational purposes, and final compensation may vary based on experience, skills, location, and role requirements.

LTS is committed to offering eligible employees comprehensive benefits that will provide them with options intended to meet their needs and the needs of their family.

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