Senior Software Engineer (Platform Automation)

Senior Software Engineer(Platform Automation)

Location: Bethesda, MD 20814 (Remote Possible onsite during PI planning/Special meeting)

Duration: CTH (Contracts to hire possible), 12 months of contracts initially

Detailed Job Description:

Summary:

As a member of an agile scrum team, the Senior Software Engineer will design and build production-grade platform services that enable developers to provision and operate infrastructure through well-defined APIs and automation. A core responsibility of this role is developing, maintaining, and advancing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities, leveraging tools such as Terraform, to automate infrastructure provisioning, management, and policy orchestration. This position is ideal for a software engineer who has built and operated backend services and later expanded into infrastructure/platform engineering (or vice versa). You will apply software engineering best practices (API design, testing, versioning, reliability, and maintainability) to an internal infrastructure and policy orchestration API, the automation it drives, and IaC modules and workflows. You will also partner closely with infrastructure, security, and developer experience teams to deliver secure, compliant, observable, and scalable capabilities that abstract cloud complexity behind simple, well-documented interfaces.

Professional Experience:

Required

• Bachelor s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 7+ years of experience building and operating backend services and APIs in production (platform, developer tooling, or internal services).
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred) and building automation around it (modules, remote state, and versioning).

Preferred

• Hands-on experience designing and developing APIs/services using languages such as Go or Python, including RESTful design, request/response modeling, and service integration.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (data structures/algorithms, clean code, design patterns, and code reviews).
• Experience building reliable services (e.g., retries, idempotency, timeouts, rate limiting, circuit breakers) and debugging distributed systems.
• Strong testing discipline (unit/integration tests, contract tests, and CI/CD automation for application code).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex production issues across services and infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure concepts and cloud fundamentals (networking, IAM, compute, storage), with the ability to collaborate effectively with infrastructure engineers.
• Experience with workflow orchestration and asynchronodistributed systems (e.g., Temporal), including retries, idempotency, and failure handling.
• Experience designing service contracts and developer-facing interfaces (OpenAPI/Swagger, SDKs/clients, schema evolution, and backward compatibility).
• Experience building or contributing to platform services, internal developer platforms (IDPs), or service-oriented architectures that expose infrastructure capabilities via APIs.
• Production experience with observability (structured logging, metrics, tracing), on-call practices, SLOs/SLIs, and incident response.
• Experience with API security patterns (authentication/authorization, secrets management, and audit logging) and enterprise integration requirements.
• Strong proficiency in Terraform, including advanced features such as workspaces, remote state management, and module composition.
• Proven experience implementing automated testing frameworks for Terraform code (e.g., Terratest).
• Experience with policy as code (Open Policy Agent/OPA) and implementing guardrails for security, compliance, and governance.
• Experience with CI/CD platforms (Harness preferred) and automating build/test/security/deploy pipelines.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, or service mesh ecosystems.
• Contributions to open-source software (platform, tooling, or infrastructure projects).

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate an internal infrastructure and policy orchestration API used by engineering teams across the company.
• Design and develop API layers and platform services that expose infrastructure capabilities to internal consumers in a secure and standardized way.
• Build and maintain services (e.g., in Go or Python) that orchestrate infrastructure workflows and integrate with Terraform-based automation.
• Define and enforce API contracts, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility standards for platform services.
• Apply production engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, operational runbooks, monitoring/alerting, and on-call readiness.
• Research, design, and engineer standards-based, highly available, secure infrastructure modules and automation that are reusable at scale.
• Educate internal users on best practices for consuming and operating platform services and infrastructure automation.
• Produce documentation focused on how services will be leveraged in solution architectures.
• Participate in the evaluation and selection of technology products.
• Analyze the current environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Analyze technology industry trends to determine the potential impact on existing and planned architectures.
• Implement comprehensive automated testing frameworks for Terraform code, including unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end validation.
• Develop and maintain Open Policy Agent (OPA) policies to enforce security, compliance, and governance standards as code.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for both infrastructure code and platform services, including build, test, security scanning, and deployment automation.
• Implement best practices and standards for infrastructure as code, including module versioning, documentation, and release management.
• Collaborate with security, compliance, and engineering teams to translate requirements into enforceable policy guardrails.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other engineers on platform service and infrastructure automation best practices.
• Monitor and improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the infrastructure automation platform.
• Create documentation and training materials for module consumers across the organization.

Managing Projects and Priorities:

• Functions as a strategic senior technical expert, providing technical leadership within own and other teams.
• Develops specific goals and plans to prioritize, organize, and accomplish work.
• Determines priorities, schedules, plans, and necessary resources to promote completion of projects on schedule.
• Analyzes information and evaluates results to choose the best solutions and solve problems.
• Reviews vendor proposals and selects appropriate vendors for services, technologies, and hardware.
• Generates and provides accurate and timely results in the form of reports, presentations, etc.
• Stays up to date technically and applies new knowledge to the job.
• Performs other reasonable duties as required for this position.

EEO