What are the responsibilities and job description for the FDA - Platform Engineer position at Rackner?
Senior Platform Engineer
Location: Remote (U.S.)
Clearance: U.S. Citizenship required; must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust (active Public Trust a plus)
Employment Type: Full-time
Location: Remote (U.S.)
Clearance: U.S. Citizenship required; must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust (active Public Trust a plus)
Employment Type: Full-time
Make an Impact on Federal Health:
- Join Rackner to build and operate the secure, cloud-native platform that powers data, analytics, and AI/ML for a federal health mission.
- You won't just run infrastructure — you'll own the internal developer platform that data scientists, data engineers, and application teams build on every day.
- Shape where it goes next: production-grade MLOps, self-service onboarding, and a paved road from commit to GovCloud.
Who You Are:
- 7 years in Platform Engineering, DevSecOps, Site Reliability, or Cloud Engineering, with senior-level ownership of a production platform
- Built an internal developer platform / PaaS from the ground up for federal clients — and taken it to production (through ATO) in a federal program, not just contributed to one
- Extensive hands-on experience across both the open-source cloud-native/data ecosystem (Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Karpenter/KEDA, Prometheus/Grafana/Loki, Trino, Dagster, dbt) and the AWS services that back them (EKS, S3, Glue, IAM/IRSA, ECR, SageMaker, Bedrock, Athena)
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes (EKS), GitOps (ArgoCD or Flux), and Terraform infrastructure-as-code
- Designs for self-service: golden paths, multi-tenancy, and onboarding that lets teams ship safely without a platform engineer in the loop
- Strong CI/CD background (GitLab CI, Jenkins, ArgoCD, and progressive delivery)
- Fluent automation and scripting (Python, Bash, Go)
- Working knowledge of federal compliance (NIST 800-53, FISMA, ATO processes); comfortable in GovCloud/regulated environments
- Treats documentation and knowledge transfer as part of "done" — clear docs and runbooks come naturally
- A people person and problem-solver who's comfortable being client-facing, wearing many hats, mentoring teammates, and growing into technical leadership
What You'll Do:
- Own the IaC GitOps foundation — evolve Terraform and ArgoCD (ApplicationSets) so the platform is declarative, self-healing, and recoverable from scratch
- Build and operate a multi-tenant, self-service platform — golden-path app onboarding, tenant/environment management, an app & tooling catalog, and internal developer tooling/CLI
- Run Kubernetes on AWS GovCloud — Karpenter and KEDA autoscaling, ingress and Gateway API, cert-manager, and ALB integration across dev/pre-prod/production
- Architect and deploy AIOps/MLOps for data science and data engineering teams — GPU compute and scheduling, model training and serving, managed notebooks (e.g., SageMaker), GenAI/Bedrock workloads, and production-grade ML pipelines
- Enable the data lakehouse — Trino/Iceberg on Glue S3, Dagster orchestration, dbt, and search — so teams have reliable, performant data access
- Deliver observability and SLOs — Prometheus, Grafana (including custom-built dashboards), and actionable alerting
- Automate security and compliance — secrets management, network policy, IRSA least-privilege, policy-as-code, vulnerability remediation, and ATO artifact generation
- Drive documentation and knowledge transfer — author and maintain platform docs, production-readiness standards, and runbooks
- Partner directly with government stakeholders and platform tenants — translate mission needs into platform capabilities, with room to grow into a technical leadership role
Preferred / Bonus:
- Hands-on MLOps/AIOps production experience for DS/DE teams — SageMaker, Bedrock, Kubeflow, MLflow, Ray, KServe/Triton/Seldon, or GPU workload scheduling
- Experience with federal health or other regulated federal data programs
- Data platform / lakehouse experience — Trino/Presto, Iceberg, Spark, Dagster/Airflow, dbt
- AWS GovCloud, IL4/IL5, FedRAMP, or air-gapped environment experience
- Policy-as-code (OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno), container security, SBOMs, and vulnerability scanning
- Kubecost/cloud cost management
- Experience establishing a documentation practice and production-readiness standards
Who We Are:
- Rackner is a cloud-native software consultancy delivering solutions for startups, enterprises, and the public sector
- We enable digital transformation through DevSecOps, platform engineering, AI/ML, and cloud-first innovation
- Join a team that thrives on solving high-impact problems and delivering secure, scalable systems for federal missions
Why You'll Love Working Here:
- Weekly Pay & Fully Remote
- Professional Growth – Paid certifications and training for relevant technologies
- Comprehensive Benefits – 401k (100% match up to 6%), PTO, medical/dental/vision, life & disability insurance
- Work-Life Perks – Gym/fitness membership, home office setup, swag, snacks, and social events
Hashtags for Visibility
#PlatformEngineering #MLOps #Kubernetes #GitOps #Terraform #AWSGovCloud #DevSecOps #FederalHealth #DataPlatform #ClearanceJobs #RacknerCareers #Remote