[Hiring] Staff Platform Engineer @Focus

Role Description

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will serve as a hands-on technical leader you will design, evolve, and govern internal enterprise platforms that accelerate delivery speed, deployment safety, and operational reliability across complex, multi-vendor systems supporting tens of millions of American students and borrowers.

You will drive enterprise observability, automated CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and compliance automation. You will act as a platform enablement authority, reducing operational toil, standardizing environment configurations, and preventing architectural fragmentation across dozens of vendors and integrated business applications.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable end-to-end (E2E) automated UI and API test suites using Playwright and TypeScript across multiple product verticals.
• Design and build automated data generation tools and synthetic applicant profile generators using Python and REST APIs to replace manual data setup processes.
• Develop user-friendly front-end tools in React and TypeScript that enable external vendor teams and government stakeholders to generate test scenarios on demand and monitor pipeline status.
• Construct, maintain, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to support quality gates and feature-driven promotion practices.
• Build reusable engineering patterns, self-service platform capabilities, CLI utilities, and starter kits that allow application teams to adopt platform tools with minimal direct intervention.
• Provide actionable feedback through thorough code reviews and 1:1 mentorship, bake high code quality standards into deliverables, and help set team development patterns.
• Serve as a trusted technical liaison to client leads and external vendor teams, advocating for developer self-service, smooth release gatekeeping, and collaborative troubleshooting.
• Support cloud infrastructure updates using Terraform, embed automated security scanning, and navigate continuous compliance processes in a FedRAMP/Public Trust environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience developing full-stack applications and tooling using TypeScript and Python.
• Practical experience writing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and leveraging infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform.
• Experience designing complex systems that interact with multiple external services, databases, and third-party APIs.
• Proven experience working on cross-functional agile teams, estimating complex engineering tasks, and directly communicating technical updates to client stakeholders.
• Strong diagnostic skills for troubleshooting complex, distributed multi-vendor application failures and microservices.
• Prior experience working on federal government digital service projects or civic tech programs.
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud environments, FedRAMP compliance standards, and observability tooling.
• Experience implementing synthetic test data generators or complex mock data services for enterprise integrations.

Requirements

• Legal authorization to work in the United States.
• Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hired.
• Work authorization that doesn’t require visa sponsorship, now or in the future.
• May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract.

Benefits

• Impactful work with a focus on work-life balance.
• Fully remote work environment.
• Encouragement to log off at the end of the day and take time off when needed.
• Access to modern tooling and practices, including cloud development environments and AI integration.
• Occasional travel required, approximately 1-2 times per year.