EMPLOYER IS A CONTRACTOR FOR THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. THIS POSITION WILL REQUIRE AN ACTIVE SECRET CLEARANCE TO APPLY. 

Staff Platform Engineer

Defense Unicorns is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join our team. This role is responsible for designing, building, and owning the runtime production environment that bridges applications (custom development, COTS, and OSS) to the underlying platform. You will drive platform architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and serve as the technical anchor between application teams and platform teams.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will own platform strategy and implementation end-to-end: defining technical roadmaps, solving complex problems that span multiple domains, driving cross-team delivery efficiency, and mentoring engineers across the team. We are looking for someone who builds and owns platforms, not someone who operates within infrastructure others have designed.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain scalable runtime production environments across cloud-native and containerized systems, including transforming applications into Kubernetes-friendly formats for bare-metal deployment
• Own the technical roadmap for the platform vertical, identifying gaps, planni