Riverside Research is an independent National Security Nonprofit dedicated to research and development in the national interest. We provide high-end technical services, research and development, and prototype solutions to some of the country’s most challenging technical problems.
 
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The Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, standardizing, and continuously improving shared infrastructure and service platforms that enable secure, scalable, and efficient delivery of IT capabilities across the enterprise. This role sits within the Systems and Services function and serves as a bridge between core infrastructure operations, automation, security, and internal service consumers.

The Platform Engineer focuses on building and maintaining the foundational platforms that support hosting, automation, identity-integrated services, observability, and self-service consumption. This includes translating operational requirements into durable platform capabilities, reducing manual administration through automation and orchestration, and ensuring that enterprise platforms are delivered in a consistent, supportable, and policy-aligned manner.

This role is well-suited for an engineer who is equally comfortable working across infrastructure, systems integration, service design, and operational maturity. The ideal candidate brings strong technical depth, a platform mindset, and the ability to create reusable solutions that improve reliability, security, and user experience across the environment.

• Design, build, maintain, and improve shared enterprise platforms supporting systems and services delivery, including compute, virtualization, storage, network-integrated services, automation, and management tooling.
• Develop and operationalize repeatable platform patterns for provisioning, lifecycle management, patching, access control, monitoring, backup, recovery, and service consumption.
• Support the evolution of a hybrid IT environment by integrating infrastructure platforms with automation, orchestration, identity, security, and observability capabilities.
• Engineer and maintain automated workflows for common operational and service-delivery functions, reducing manual effort and improving consistency, auditability, and speed of delivery.
• Partner with infrastructure, network, cybersecurity, and service management teams to define platform standards, guardrails, and approved service offerings.
• Translate technical platform capabilities into consumable services that can be exposed through a service catalog, self-service interface, or standardized request model.
• Establish and document platform baselines, reference architectures, operating procedures, and support models to improve maintainability and reduce configuration drift.
• Contribute to the design and administration of enterprise management platforms such as virtualization management, automation/orchestration suites, monitoring, logging, backup, and configuration management tools.
• Support identity-aware platform integration, including role-based access models, directory integration, certificate-based services, and secure administrative patterns where appropriate.
• Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, and health visibility for supported platforms; identify trends, recurring issues, and opportunities for resiliency and service improvement.
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and problem management efforts related to platform outages, degraded service, or recurring operational issues.
• Ensure platforms are designed and operated in accordance with organizational security requirements, compliance expectations, and approved engineering standards.
• Collaborate with project teams and service owners to onboard new workloads or capabilities onto approved enterprise platforms while maintaining consistency with architectural and operational standards.
• Evaluate existing tools, scripts, and manual processes to identify opportunities for consolidation, standardization, and modernization.
• Provide technical input into roadmaps, upgrade planning, capacity planning, and lifecycle decisions for core systems and service platforms.
• Produce clear technical documentation, implementation guidance, and handoff materials to support long-term operations and cross-team sustainment.
• Mentor junior administrators or engineers as needed and promote engineering discipline around automation, documentation, change control, and operational excellence.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree +5 years experience in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• Experience administering and engineering enterprise infrastructure platforms in a systems, services, or platform engineering capacity.
• Strong working knowledge of one or more core platform domains, such as virtualization, Windows or Linux server administration, storage, backup, identity-integrated services, or infrastructure automation.
• Experience with infrastructure automation, scripting, or orchestration using tools such as PowerShell, Python, Ansible, Terraform, or comparable technologies.
• Experience supporting shared enterprise platforms rather than only single-purpose systems, with an understanding of standardization, service lifecycle, and reusable design patterns.
• Familiarity with monitoring, logging, and operational support practices for production IT environments.
• Ability to document architectures, procedures, and technical standards in a clear and supportable manner.
• Strong troubleshooting and systems-integration skills across multiple technology layers.
• Ability to work effectively across technical teams and balance project work with operational responsibilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with VMware-based environments, including technologies such as vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation, NSX, Aria Automation, Aria Operations, or comparable private cloud platforms.
• Experience building or supporting self-service provisioning, service catalogs, or automated fulfillment workflows.
• Familiarity with identity and access integration patterns, including Active Directory, Entra ID, certificate-based authentication, privileged access controls, or role-based access models.
• Experience with enterprise backup, disaster recovery, vulnerability management, configuration compliance, or security hardening practices.
• Experience supporting highly regulated, segmented, or policy-driven environments where engineering decisions must align to security and compliance requirements.
• Familiarity with observability platforms, centralized logging, or operational analytics tools such as Splunk or similar products.
• Experience with IT service management practices, change control, and operational governance in a mature enterprise environment.
• Relevant technical certifications in platform, cloud, virtualization, operating systems, automation, or security disciplines.

Desired Characteristics

• Thinks in terms of platforms and services rather than isolated systems.
• Brings strong engineering discipline and follows through on documentation, standardization, and operational sustainment.
• Balances technical depth with practicality and can build solutions that are elegant, supportable, and aligned to organizational constraints.
• Comfortable operating in environments undergoing modernization, standardization, or service transformation.
• Demonstrates ownership, sound judgment, and a bias toward durable, repeatable solutions rather than one-off fixes.

 

$102,000- $140,000 This represents the typical compensation range for this position based on experience, location and other factors.

 
Riverside Research Institute is a not-for-profit, technology-oriented defense company, where service to our customers and support of our staff is our overall mission. Riverside is an affirmative action-equal opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws regarding recruitment and hiring.  Riverside offers comprehensive compensation and benefit packages to our employees.
Riverside bases its employment decisions solely on technical experience, qualifications and other job-related criteria related to our organizational purpose as a not-for-profit company, and without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex marital status, sexual orientation, national origin, physical or mental disability, veteran’s status or any other status legally protected by applicable federal, state, and local law.