Job Requirements
Fort George Meade, MD
Top Secret/SCI Polygraph not specified
Senior Level Career (10+ yrs experience)
$185,000 - $245,000
Job Description
Lead Platform Engineer
Cloud Infrastructure & Automation | Codescratch
Fort Meade, MD | Hybrid: approximately 50% onsite | $185,000–$245,000
The opportunity
Codescratch is seeking a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure supporting our distributed endpoint collection and analytics platform. You will design, automate, operate, and improve multiple cloud environments and on-premises infrastructure, including hybrid deployments, working directly with software engineers, security specialists, and government stakeholders. This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibility for platform reliability, security, delivery, and cost.
We are looking for someone who can take an operational objective, determine what needs to happen, and carry the work through implementation and verification. You should be comfortable identifying risks, setting priorities, proposing improvements, and making sound technical decisions without waiting for detailed task assignments. Ownership includes communicating tradeoffs, documenting decisions, and involving the right people when a decision affects mission operations, security, or budget.
How the hybrid arrangement works
Plan for approximately 50% onsite work at Fort Meade, MD, and live within commuting distance. Onsite time follows the work: deployments, restricted-environment access, maintenance, troubleshooting, and customer coordination. The balance may vary from week to week as operational needs change; a fixed alternating-day rotation does not define the role.
What you will own
• Infrastructure automation. Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules and Ansible roles and playbooks for provisioning, configuration, patching, and recovery. Keep infrastructure in version control, review changes, manage state and secrets appropriately, and detect configuration drift.
• Multiple cloud environments. Independently plan and operate AWS accounts and development, test, and production environments. Maintain clear access boundaries, environment inventories, configuration standards, and repeatable deployment processes as the platform expands.
• Reliability and recovery. Own monitoring, actionable alerts, capacity planning, backups, restore testing, and incident response. Troubleshoot across Linux, networking, containers, application services, and PostgreSQL, and turn recurring problems into durable fixes.
• Cloud cost management. Understand and explain cloud spend by environment and workload. Establish tagging, budgets, forecasts, and cost alerts; evaluate compute sizing, storage and retention, data transfer, and idle resources. Measure savings and balance cost decisions against performance, availability, and security requirements.
• Deployment and platform operations. Maintain CI/CD pipelines, container deployment workflows, and repeatable release and rollback procedures. Partner with developers to make application delivery reliable and routine.
• Security and operational readiness. Work with security specialists to implement access controls, hardening, patching, secrets management, and audit logging. Produce configuration and operational evidence needed for RMF assessments and ongoing monitoring.
• Technical direction and follow-through. Maintain a prioritized platform backlog, surface dependencies early, and lead improvements from design through production. Keep runbooks and recovery procedures usable by the team, and communicate status, risks, and recommendations clearly to program leadership and the customer.
What you bring
• Production ownership. At least five years of relevant platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or systems engineering experience, including direct responsibility for production environments.
• Linux systems administration. Strong command-line skills and production experience administering Linux systems, including users and permissions, systemd services, package management and patching, filesystems and storage, SSH, and host security. Ability to diagnose boot, service, CPU, memory, and disk issues using system logs and standard Linux tools.
• Networking and troubleshooting. Solid understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, routing, subnets, firewalls, TLS, and load balancing. Ability to trace connectivity and performance issues across hosts, containers, and cloud or on-premises networks using tools such as ip, ss, dig, curl, and tcpdump, identify the root cause, and verify the fix.
• Strong Terraform and Ansible skills. Experience building and maintaining infrastructure automation used by others, including reusable components, change review, troubleshooting, and safe updates to existing environments.
• AWS operational depth. Practical experience with IAM, VPC networking, compute, storage, load balancing, RDS/PostgreSQL, and CloudWatch, including diagnosis of failures that span services.
• Independent management of multiple environments. Demonstrated ability to manage competing operational priorities across cloud accounts or deployment environments with limited day-to-day direction. Be prepared to explain the environments you owned, decisions you made, and results you delivered.
• Cost accountability. Experience reviewing cloud bills and usage, forecasting spend, investigating cost changes, and implementing measurable improvements without compromising mission requirements.
• Automation and delivery skills. Strong Linux administration and Python or shell scripting skills; experience with CI/CD, containers, and production deployment and rollback workflows. Familiarity with Kubernetes operations and deployment tooling.
• Judgment and communication. Ability to identify what needs attention, distinguish routine work from decisions requiring coordination, and explain technical choices to engineering, security, and customer stakeholders. Willingness to mentor colleagues and share operational knowledge.
A bachelor’s degree in computer science, information assurance, or related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience. Relevant certifications may support equivalent qualifications. Security+ or the ability to obtain the security certification required for the assigned role.
Why Codescratch
Codescratch is a small company founded by software engineers with more than a decade of shared defense-industry experience. We focus on practical engineering, direct collaboration, and employee development. You will work closely with the people building the software and have a direct voice in how the platform is designed and operated.
• Retirement. Codescratch contributes 15% of your earnings each pay period to your 401(k), in addition to any contribution you choose to make. Contributions begin on day one, with no vesting schedule.
• Healthcare. Codescratch contributes 12% of your rate toward your employee premium for healthcare, vision, and dental.
• Compensation for time worked. Get paid for every hour you work.
• Professional development. Education and training allowances, coverage for job-relevant certifications, and partial reimbursement for books, audiobooks, and online video courses.
Clearance and compensation
U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance with a polygraph are required in the reference posting. These requirements must be confirmed for this position before publication.
Cloud Infrastructure & Automation | Codescratch
Fort Meade, MD | Hybrid: approximately 50% onsite | $185,000–$245,000
The opportunity
Codescratch is seeking a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure supporting our distributed endpoint collection and analytics platform. You will design, automate, operate, and improve multiple cloud environments and on-premises infrastructure, including hybrid deployments, working directly with software engineers, security specialists, and government stakeholders. This is a senior individual contributor role with technical leadership responsibility for platform reliability, security, delivery, and cost.
We are looking for someone who can take an operational objective, determine what needs to happen, and carry the work through implementation and verification. You should be comfortable identifying risks, setting priorities, proposing improvements, and making sound technical decisions without waiting for detailed task assignments. Ownership includes communicating tradeoffs, documenting decisions, and involving the right people when a decision affects mission operations, security, or budget.
How the hybrid arrangement works
Plan for approximately 50% onsite work at Fort Meade, MD, and live within commuting distance. Onsite time follows the work: deployments, restricted-environment access, maintenance, troubleshooting, and customer coordination. The balance may vary from week to week as operational needs change; a fixed alternating-day rotation does not define the role.
What you will own
• Infrastructure automation. Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules and Ansible roles and playbooks for provisioning, configuration, patching, and recovery. Keep infrastructure in version control, review changes, manage state and secrets appropriately, and detect configuration drift.
• Multiple cloud environments. Independently plan and operate AWS accounts and development, test, and production environments. Maintain clear access boundaries, environment inventories, configuration standards, and repeatable deployment processes as the platform expands.
• Reliability and recovery. Own monitoring, actionable alerts, capacity planning, backups, restore testing, and incident response. Troubleshoot across Linux, networking, containers, application services, and PostgreSQL, and turn recurring problems into durable fixes.
• Cloud cost management. Understand and explain cloud spend by environment and workload. Establish tagging, budgets, forecasts, and cost alerts; evaluate compute sizing, storage and retention, data transfer, and idle resources. Measure savings and balance cost decisions against performance, availability, and security requirements.
• Deployment and platform operations. Maintain CI/CD pipelines, container deployment workflows, and repeatable release and rollback procedures. Partner with developers to make application delivery reliable and routine.
• Security and operational readiness. Work with security specialists to implement access controls, hardening, patching, secrets management, and audit logging. Produce configuration and operational evidence needed for RMF assessments and ongoing monitoring.
• Technical direction and follow-through. Maintain a prioritized platform backlog, surface dependencies early, and lead improvements from design through production. Keep runbooks and recovery procedures usable by the team, and communicate status, risks, and recommendations clearly to program leadership and the customer.
What you bring
• Production ownership. At least five years of relevant platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or systems engineering experience, including direct responsibility for production environments.
• Linux systems administration. Strong command-line skills and production experience administering Linux systems, including users and permissions, systemd services, package management and patching, filesystems and storage, SSH, and host security. Ability to diagnose boot, service, CPU, memory, and disk issues using system logs and standard Linux tools.
• Networking and troubleshooting. Solid understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, routing, subnets, firewalls, TLS, and load balancing. Ability to trace connectivity and performance issues across hosts, containers, and cloud or on-premises networks using tools such as ip, ss, dig, curl, and tcpdump, identify the root cause, and verify the fix.
• Strong Terraform and Ansible skills. Experience building and maintaining infrastructure automation used by others, including reusable components, change review, troubleshooting, and safe updates to existing environments.
• AWS operational depth. Practical experience with IAM, VPC networking, compute, storage, load balancing, RDS/PostgreSQL, and CloudWatch, including diagnosis of failures that span services.
• Independent management of multiple environments. Demonstrated ability to manage competing operational priorities across cloud accounts or deployment environments with limited day-to-day direction. Be prepared to explain the environments you owned, decisions you made, and results you delivered.
• Cost accountability. Experience reviewing cloud bills and usage, forecasting spend, investigating cost changes, and implementing measurable improvements without compromising mission requirements.
• Automation and delivery skills. Strong Linux administration and Python or shell scripting skills; experience with CI/CD, containers, and production deployment and rollback workflows. Familiarity with Kubernetes operations and deployment tooling.
• Judgment and communication. Ability to identify what needs attention, distinguish routine work from decisions requiring coordination, and explain technical choices to engineering, security, and customer stakeholders. Willingness to mentor colleagues and share operational knowledge.
A bachelor’s degree in computer science, information assurance, or related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience. Relevant certifications may support equivalent qualifications. Security+ or the ability to obtain the security certification required for the assigned role.
Why Codescratch
Codescratch is a small company founded by software engineers with more than a decade of shared defense-industry experience. We focus on practical engineering, direct collaboration, and employee development. You will work closely with the people building the software and have a direct voice in how the platform is designed and operated.
• Retirement. Codescratch contributes 15% of your earnings each pay period to your 401(k), in addition to any contribution you choose to make. Contributions begin on day one, with no vesting schedule.
• Healthcare. Codescratch contributes 12% of your rate toward your employee premium for healthcare, vision, and dental.
• Compensation for time worked. Get paid for every hour you work.
• Professional development. Education and training allowances, coverage for job-relevant certifications, and partial reimbursement for books, audiobooks, and online video courses.
Clearance and compensation
U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance with a polygraph are required in the reference posting. These requirements must be confirmed for this position before publication.
group id: 91103215