Software Engineer (Platform Automation) :: Bethesda, MD (Remote)

Software Engineer (Platform Automation) - Remote, Bethesda, MD

Duration: 12+ months

Job Summary:

Seeking for a Software Engineer (Platform Automation) to design and build production-grade platform services. You'll enable developers to provision and operate infrastructure through well-defined APIs and automation. Your core responsibility will be developing, maintaining, and advancing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities, using tools like Terraform, to automate infrastructure provisioning, management, and policy orchestration.

Core Work Activities:

• Design, build, and operate internal infrastructure and policy orchestration APIs.
• Develop API layers and platform services for secure and standardized infrastructure capabilities.
• Build and maintain services in Go or Python for infrastructure workflows and Terraform-based automation.
• Define and enforce API contracts, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility standards.
• Apply production engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Research and engineer highly available, secure infrastructure modules and automation.
• Educate internal users on best practices for platform services and infrastructure automation.
• Create documentation for service leverage in solution architectures.
• Analyze the current environment and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Develop and maintain Open Policy Agent (OPA) policies for security and compliance.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure code and platform services.
• Collaborate with security, compliance, and engineering teams on policy guardrails.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship on platform service and infrastructure automation.
• Monitor and improve the reliability and scalability of the infrastructure automation platform.

Managing Projects and Priorities:

• Function as a strategic senior technical expert, providing technical leadership.
• Develop specific goals and plans to prioritize and accomplish work.
• Analyze information to choose the best solutions and solve problems.
• Review vendor proposals and select appropriate vendors for services and technologies.
• Generate accurate and timely results in reports and presentations.
• Keep up-to-date technically and apply new knowledge to the job.

Delivering on the Needs of Key Stakeholders:

• Understand and meet the needs of key stakeholders.
• Communicate concepts clearly and persuasively.
• Demonstrate an understanding of business priorities to support performance goals.

Education and Experience:

• 5+ years of experience building and operating backend services and APIs in production.
• Practical experience with Go or Python for API/service development.
• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building reliable services and debugging distributed systems.
• Basic testing discipline and CI/CD automation for application code.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure concepts and cloud fundamentals.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred).
• Excellent problem-solving skills for complex production issues.

Preferred Experience:

• Exposure to workflow orchestration and asynchronous/distributed systems.
• Familiarity with designing service contracts and developer-facing interfaces.
• Experience with platform services or service-oriented architectures.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools and incident response.
• Understanding of API security patterns and enterprise integration requirements.
• Familiarity with Terraform and automated testing frameworks for Terraform code.
• Exposure to policy as code and CI/CD platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, or service mesh ecosystems.
• Interest in contributing to open-source software.