Staff Platform Engineer, Platform Development

Location: Denver, CO 

About the Role

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will play a critical role in owning the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of the operational platform. Simplesense enables rapid decision-making and data visualization for critical infrastructure through a combination of on-premise and cloud services. The Platform Team has primary responsibility for cloud infrastructure, application hosting, user access and authorization and security tooling among other features. You will oversee the end-to-end success of core platform components—from cloud network architecture to performance and reliability—and partner closely with the Product and Operations teams to remove ambiguity and ensure our platform remains resilient, secure, and ready for the mission.

Work Model: We prioritize candidates in the Denver, CO

Locals: 2-3 days/week onsite.

What Success Looks Like:

30 Days: Onboard, audit current platform workflows, and establish relationships with cross-functional Product and Engineering leads.

60 Days: Provide technical contributions to existing projects and develop a full understanding of the existing and planned platform development efforts.

90 Days: Identify opportunities to improve reliability, performance, security and/or development workflows and take a technical leadership role in forming the Platform technical roadmap.

What You’ll Do

• End-to-End Technical Ownership: Serve as a technical owner for the success of platform development projects, from initial concept evaluation and design to final delivery and maintenance. Responsibilities will span new feature development and integration, cloud network architecture updates and implementation of performance and reliability improvements.
• Internal and External Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional Development, Product, and Operations teams, as well as external vendors, to ensure the platform meets stability, security, and scalability requirements on operational timelines.
• Technical Leadership: Work with Engineering and Product leadership to ensure clear, actionable and achievable plans that span the organization.
• System Design & Architecture: Lead planning sessions, create design documents, and make high-level technical decisions for core platform components (e.g., infrastructure-as-code, deployment pipelines, operational reliability, security controls, and disaster recovery planning).
• Force Multiplier & Mentorship: Elevate the entire team by establishing best practices, conducting insightful code reviews, and unblocking teammates who are stuck, prioritizing the team's output over individual coding tasks.
• Technical Contributor: Provide hands-on technical contributions for the most critical or demanding parts of the project, setting the technical pattern and standard for others, with a healthy time allocation of approximately 60% on solving technical problems (coding, design, reviews).
• Team & Process Improvement: Dedicate time (approx. 40%) to planning, cross-team communication, defining scope with Product Owners, breaking down work, and identifying/fixing process issues (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, testing standards for platform components).

What You Bring

Required Qualifications:

Experience: 7–15 years of professional experience building and delivering scalable, secure, and reliable systems and cloud services.

Technical Skill: 

• Deep expertise in AWS systems, resources and best practices (ex: EC2, SSM, databases, scaling strategies, resilient architectures) 
• Experience with AWS Cloudformation infrastructure automation (Terraform or CloudFormation), cloud networking and proficiency in NodeJS or Python.
• AWS cloud networking experience (ex: VPCs, subnets, Route53, transit gateways, network firewalls)
• Experience replatforming or rehosting services and applications within an AWS environment

Domain Knowledge:

• Proven experience at a Staff or Principal level, navigating significant technical ambiguity and leading large-scale, cross-functional technical efforts.

Leadership:

• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership within a cross-functional team to resolve problems and deliver solutions

Clearance & Eligibility:

• Must be a U.S. Citizen
• Must be able to obtain a DoD NIPR network account and Common Access Card (CAC)
• Must have, or be able to obtain, a Secret Clearance
• Security relevant certification (e.g., CompTIA Security+, Cloud+) or willingness to obtain
• Ability to travel for a full week quarterly for team planning and client Program Management Reviews.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Based in the Denver, CO
• Professional AWS Certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer).
• Experience with Windows domain environments.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools (e.g., Splunk, Datadog).
• Experience in operational intelligence, industrial technology, or working within DoD/Air Force environments.

Our Culture

At Simplesense, we value high-trust autonomy. We look for people who can navigate ambiguity and are driven by the mission.

Safety & Innovation: You embed security and reliability practices into daily work to drive continuous improvement and mitigate risk.

People & Communication: You invite vigorous debate and offer "kindly blunt" feedback, always maintaining empathy and assuming noble intent.

Integrity & Ethics: You build trust by honoring commitments, acting ethically, and resolving conflict through direct, honest communication.

Strategic Problem Solving: You focus on high-priority issues to create documented, and scalable solutions—avoiding shortcuts.

Agility: You move quickly to fix small problems, learn from the past, and pivot transparently when the mission requires it.

Compensation and Benefits

Pay Range: $190k-$260k. per year. Compensation is determined based on experience, skill level, and location. We review ranges regularly to ensure market competitiveness.