Defense Unicorns
Platform Engineer
About this role
Defense Unicorns seeks a Platform Engineer to develop and maintain cloud-based Kubernetes infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and platform reliability systems for a U.S. government contracting environment. You'll bridge application teams and platform operations, managing infrastructure as code, security compliance, and incident response while requiring U.S. citizenship and DoD clearance eligibility.
What you'll do
- Build and manage Kubernetes clusters and containerized deployments on AWS/EKS/RKE2
- Develop and maintain infrastructure as code using tools like Terraform for consistent resource provisioning
- Own GitLab CI pipelines, runner deployments, and automated build/deployment workflows
- Implement monitoring, alerting, and logging systems to ensure platform health and incident investigation
- Manage certificate lifecycle, identity/access via Keycloak, and security compliance including Iron Bank and ATO processes
- Support tier-2 on-call incidents, mentor junior engineers, and document standards and architecture decisions
What they're looking for
- Kubernetes cluster deployment and troubleshooting
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar)
- GitLab CI and CI/CD pipeline design
- AWS cloud platforms (EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, VPC)
- Linux/Unix system administration and command-line tools
- Docker containerization and image management
- YAML and Helm chart proficiency
- Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK)
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Defense Unicorns
Defense Unicorns builds software platforms and infrastructure services for defense and government customers, including containerized applications, package management systems, and Kubernetes-based deployment environments for disconnected or hybrid cloud settings. The company is hiring software engineers, platform engineers, technical writers, and military SkillBridge interns to develop, deploy, and support these mission-critical systems.
- Website
- defenseunicorns.com
Likely interview questions
- Describe your experience managing Kubernetes clusters in production and how you've handled a critical infrastructure failure.
- Walk us through your approach to designing a CI/CD pipeline in GitLab CI for a multi-team environment.