C5i Principal Platform Engineer

RTX RTX · Aerospace · tewksbury, MA +1 · Engineering

This role is for a Principal Platform Engineer supporting C5I mission systems within the Missile Defense Sensors Software Department. The engineer will design, optimize, and maintain secure, scalable, mission-critical software infrastructure, focusing on DevSecOps, automation, container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines for real-time systems. The role requires technical leadership, influencing architecture, and ensuring robust capabilities for mission execution. While the company works in defense and may use AI, this specific role focuses on the underlying platform and infrastructure engineering, not direct AI/ML model development or research.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the platform architecture and define modernization strategies for C5I mission systems, including automation, container orchestration and secure platform design.
  2. Lead the development of resilient, scalable, and secure platform environments using Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Artifactory, and related technologies.
  3. Influence program‑level decisions involving hardware/software trade‑offs, COTS selection, platform reuse, and requirements synthesis.
  4. Architect end‑to‑end DevSecOps workflows to support high‑frequency, high‑quality deployments across MDS programs.
  5. Oversee CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD) to ensure secure, automated build, test, and release processes at scale.

Skills

Required

  • Linux platform engineering and administration
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • VMware/KVM
  • Python
  • Bash
  • PowerShell
  • Jenkins
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • Technical leadership
  • Ability to obtain U.S. government issued Secret security clearance
  • U.S. citizenship

Nice to have

  • Deep understanding of radar, C2, or large‑scale real‑time defense systems
  • Docker, Ansible Tower, Artifactory, GitHub/Bitbucket in secure or classified environments
  • High-availability systems
  • Distributed architectures
  • High-performance computing environments
  • Influencing architecture across multiple programs
  • Agile management tools (JIRA, Confluence)

What the JD emphasized

  • U.S. government issued security clearance is required
  • U.S. citizenship is required
  • Active and existing security clearance required after day 1
  • Expert‑level experience in Linux platform engineering and administration
  • Experience architecting or leading mission‑critical platform or DevSecOps environments for distributed or real‑time systems