Senior Platform Engineer

Position: Senior Platform Engineer
Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite - in Rockville, MD or Tysons Corner, VA
Will require an onsite interview
Senior Platform Engineer with strong AWS platform-building experience to help modernize an existing big data platform. This role is not a Data Engineer or ETL Engineer position.
The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience designing, building, and evolving cloud platforms using AWS services, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and automation-along with exposure to big data technologies.
This Role IS:

• Platform engineering focused
• AWSnative and infrastructuredriven
• A blend of Platform Engineering + DevOps
• Focused on building and modernizing platforms, not just maintaining them

✖ This Role Is NOT:

• An ETL Engineer role
• A data pipeline-centric role
• A junior or midlevel engineering role

Current Platform Environment:

• AWS EMR
• Amazon S3
• Amazon RDS
• CloudWatch
• CloudFormation
• CI/CD pipelines

The team is actively modernizing the platform, including:

• Evaluating and using Athena
• Working with Trino
• Exploring additional AWS-native and modern big data / analytics services
• Migrating from legacy patterns to newer architectural approaches

Hands-on experience with Athena/Trino is a strong plus, but deep conceptual understanding and platform design experience are acceptable substitutes.
Required Technical Skills:

• Strong hands-on experience with AWS
• Deep understanding of:
  • S3
  • EMR
  • RDS
  • CloudWatch
• Experience designing scalable, reusable platforms
• Infrastructure as Code
• CloudFormation - Required
• Terraform - Strong Plus
• Must have authored and maintained templates (not just consumed them)
• DevOps & CI/CD
• CI/CD pipeline design and implementation
• Git-based workflows
• Automated deployments for infrastructure and services
• Operational mindset (monitoring, reliability, automation)
• Programming & Automation
• Strong Python development experience
• Python used for:
  • Automation
  • Orchestration
  • Platform tooling
• Big Data / Analytics (Preferred)
• EMR experience
• Exposure to Athena, Trino, or similar query engines
• Understanding of big data platform design and tradeoffs
• Experience & Seniority Expectations

Senior-level engineer only:

• Approximately 5+ years of recent, consistent platform engineering experience
• Platform ownership experience required (not just contributors to pipelines)
• Ability to articulate:
  • Platform design decisions
  • Tradeoffs
  • Modernization strategies