Platform Engineer

Overview

We are seeking Full-Stack Platform Engineer, with a Tinkerer mindset, who can build high-quality software across the stack while also owning the infrastructure, pipelines, and tooling that accelerate our engineering teams. This role blends hands-on development, cloud architecture, ETL pipeline engineering, and platform automation. The ideal candidate is someone who loves solving problems across languages, systems, and environments-and has strong experience in AWS, Terraform, CI/CD (CloudBees/Jenkins), and more.

Contributions

This engineer will design, build, and maintain developer tooling, internal services, automated workflows, ETL/ELT pipelines, and more. They will work across multiple languages, cloud-native components, front-end admin tools, and infrastructure-as-code.

This is a hybrid role that blends:

• Software Engineering (API development, tooling, dashboards, automation scripts)
• Data Engineering / ETL (AWS-native ingestion pipelines, transformations, orchestration)
• Infrastructure & DevOps (Terraform, CI/CD, environment orchestration)
• Developer Experience (improving speed, reliability, and ease of internal development)

We need someone who is a curious builder, a tinkerer, and someone capable of jumping into any system (front-end, back-end, infrastructure, or data) and making it better.

Additional contributions:

• Build and maintain internal full-stack tools, admin interfaces, services, and automation scripts
• Develop reusable frameworks, libraries, and SDKs that support internal teams
• Create efficient back-end APIs, microservices, and event-driven components
• Build, operate, and optimize AWS-native ETL pipeline
• Work with AWS Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, S3, Kinesis, EventBridge, DynamoDB, RDS, Athena
• Implement data quality checks, schema validation, monitoring, and alerting
• Tune pipeline performance and cost efficiency
• Author and maintain Terraform modules for AWS-based systems
• Work with CloudBees/Jenkins to create, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines
• Implement environment automation, deployment workflows, and development environments
• Manage logging, monitoring, and distributed system health
• Build tools that improve local dev, testing, release automation, and operational visibility
• Reduce friction across engineering teams by improving processes and internal systems
• Document systems, train others on tooling, and promote engineering best practices
• Prototype new internal tools and evaluate new technologies
• Thrive in ambiguous environments and figure things out independently
• Enjoy tinkering, solving problems end-to-end, and connecting systems together
• Stay hands-on with a wide variety of technologies

Qualifications

Required:

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or similar hybrid roles
• B.S. in technical field
• U.S Citizenship
• Strong proficiency in at least two programming languages (Python, Node.js, Go, Java, etc.)
• Experience developing REST APIs, backend services, and automation tools
• Comfortable with moderate front-end development (React, Vue, Angular, or similar)
• Experience building, maintaining, and monitoring ETL/ELT pipelines in AWS
• Hands-on expertise with:
  • AWS Glue ETL, Lambda, Step Functions
  • S3 (object lifecycle, notifications, best practices)
  • EventBridge, Kinesis, SNS/SQS
  • RDS/PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, RedShift
  • Apache Airflow, Spark, etc.
• Understanding of AWS networking, IAM, and security best practices
• Ability to reason about distributed systems, scalability, and fault tolerance
• Experience with Docker and container workflow
• Strong experience with:
  • CloudBees/Jenkins
  • Terraform
  • Artifacts, versioning, environment promotion
• Experience automating deployments, testing pipelines, and environment provisioning
• Natural tinkerer who enjoys exploring new tools and building prototypes
• Comfortable working independently and owning projects start-to-finish
• High curiosity, strong debugging skills, and willingness to dive into unfamiliar systems
• Collaborative and communicative when working with developers, data engineers, and leadership

Preferred (Nice to have):

• Experience with serverless architectures
• Kubernetes/EKS familiarity
• Experience with observability platforms (Grafana, CloudWatch, etc)
• Experience mentoring junior developers or influencing engineering practices

About steampunk

Steampunk relies on several factors to determine salary, including but not limited to geographic location, contractual requirements, education, knowledge, skills, competencies, and experience. The projected compensation range for this position is $90,000 to $165,000. The estimate displayed represents a typical annual salary range for this position. Annual salary is just one aspect of Steampunk's total compensation package for employees. Learn more about additional Steampunk benefits here.

Identity Statement

As part of the application process, you are expected to be on camera during interviews and assessments. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud.

Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology , we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges. As an employee owned company , we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers - and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com .