Principal Platform Engineer

LTS is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to join a small, senior engineering team applying frontier AI to one of the most consequential legacy systems still running in production today.

The mission: build agents that read, translate, and modernize a decades-old codebase that millions of people quietly depend on. The work has executive backing, real users, and a customer who knows exactly what they’re buying. Specifics shared once we’re talking.

The team is small by design. Every seat carries unusual leverage, and we hire people who are already deep in this work. We use AI tooling natively — agents in parallel, model as collaborator, no exceptions.

What You’ll Do:

The Principal Platform Engineer owns the architectural shape of the platform on commercial AWS. Infrastructure decisions compound and are hard to undo, so this role calls for someone with real production experience: outages they caused, audits they sat through, identity bugs they debugged at 2am.

• Own the architectural shape of the platform — VPC, managed PostgreSQL, serverless compute, object storage, observability, CI/CD, defined as code.
• Own the security and compliance shape so federal identity standards (SSO, smart-card, federated identity) plug in cleanly when the platform moves into restricted environments: encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, identity abstraction, tenant isolation, data residency primitives.
• Own architectural portability so deployment in regulated or restricted environments is straightforward when the time comes.
• Own internal developer experience — logs, traces, deploy speed, the local dev loop.
• Be on call for systems you designed; own the postmortem when things break.
• Translate regulatory pressure (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2, ITAR, or comparable control catalogs) into concrete infrastructure decisions.
• Partner with downstream deployment teams on the handoff into restricted environments.

What We’re Looking For:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, plus 10 years of professional infrastructure or platform engineering experience; equivalent experience may substitute for the degree requirement.
• Has been on call for production systems they personally designed and can talk in detail about an outage they caused, an audit they sat through, or an identity bug they debugged past 4am.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
• Decade-plus on production cloud platforms; years of experience matter for this role specifically.
• Hands-on AWS depth; strong infrastructure-as-code (CDK or Terraform).
• Identity and access design — SAML/OIDC, federated identity, identity abstraction patterns.
• Has worked under regulatory pressure (FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC 2, ITAR, or similar) and can read a control catalog and translate it into infrastructure decisions, even without having driven a full accreditation.
• Designs for portability — environments other than the one personally operated in.
• Heavy native use of AI tooling: agents in parallel, model as collaborator.
• Strong observability discipline — logs, traces, deploy speed, the local dev loop.
• Demonstrated experience in a remote work environment.

Nice to Have:

• GovCloud, FedRAMP, or restricted-environment deployment experience.
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture.
• Sovereign cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped deployments.
• Accreditation experience — having driven or contributed to a federal authorization.
• HIPAA/HITECH operational experience.
• Open-source contributions in the platform, infrastructure-as-code, or identity space.

What’s in it for you? 

• The opportunity to support high visibility federal missions in IT and healthcare
• A culture that values innovation, growth, collaboration, and quality
• Access to cutting-edge tools and technologies
• Comprehensive benefits for you and your family
• A career path that rewards ambition and performance

If you’re ready to push boundaries, sharpen your skills, and join a team that is passionate about building what’s next, we’d love to meet you. Apply today and let’s build a future together!