{"id":658773,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure","title":"Principal Platform Engineer — Kubernetes & Cloud Infrastructure","company":{"id":679982,"name":"Ombud","domain":"ombud.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ombud","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Denver, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":119000,"max_usd":245000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":489},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Consul","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub Actions","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"ISO 27001","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":true},{"name":"Pinecone","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Qdrant","optional":true},{"name":"Weaviate","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-03T21:50:27Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T16:22:35Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":130,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":130},"description":"Location: Denver, CO (hybrid - Tue/Wed/Thu in office)\nReports to: CEO\nThe role\nOmbud's platform runs production AI workloads for enterprise customers, and we're scaling toward a self-service motion where customers onboard, ingest content, and operate the product without manual implementation. That requires an infrastructure foundation that can handle multi-tenant scale, high reliability, and the unique demands of generative AI workloads - without ballooning the AWS bill.\nWe're hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to own that foundation. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad architectural authority. You will not have direct reports. You will set the technical direction for our cloud infrastructure, partner with engineering on production scaling decisions, and operate the platform with the discipline a SOC 2 / ISO 27001 customer base requires.\nWhat you'll own\nProduction Kubernetes (EKS) clusters: capacity planning, node group strategy, gen-AI workload isolation, blast-radius containment.\nAWS infrastructure end-to-end: RDS, DMS, Kafka (MSK), ECR, networking, IAM, multi-region deployments (including Ireland for EU data residency).\nInfrastructure-as-code in Terraform - modules, environments, drift management, peer review.\nCI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or your recommended replacement) - fast, reliable, secure builds for backend and frontend services.\nObservability: Grafana dashboards, Prometheus metrics, log pipelines, on-call alerting, SLO definition.\nCost optimization. AWS spend is one of our top three variable costs. Reducing it by 20% is a tangible objective for this seat.\nSecurity posture: secrets management (Consul/Vault), IAM hygiene, vulnerability patching, support for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audit cycles.\nArchitecture leadership on the self-service infrastructure roadmap: how we onboard a customer without human intervention and scale to 10x our current tenant count.\nDocumentation and runbooks that let the rest of the engineering team operate the platform when you're unavailable.\nMust-haves\n8+ years of platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps experience, with at least 3+ years operating production Kubernetes at scale.\nDeep AWS expertise across compute, storage, networking, data services, and IAM.\nProduction fluency with Terraform, Docker, Linux, and CI/CD systems.\nTrack record of architectural decisions that materially improved reliability, cost, or developer velocity - with specific, measurable outcomes you can point to.\nComfort operating as a senior IC who sets technical direction across teams without formal authority.\nStrong written communication - runbooks, architecture decision records, post-incident reviews.\nWillingness to be in-office Tuesday through Thursday in Denver.\nNice-to-haves\nProduction experience supporting generative AI or ML workloads (GPU node groups, vector databases, model serving).\nExperience with Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate, or other vector stores in production.\nPostgreSQL operational depth - replication, performance tuning, backup/restore.\nExperience scaling a multi-tenant SaaS platform from ~100 customers to ~1,000.\nSOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audit experience.\nFamiliarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent).\nWhat success looks like\nFirst 30 days\nComplete a written audit of our current infrastructure: what we have, where the risks are, what's costing us money.\nEstablish on-call rotation participation and respond to your first production incident.\nIdentify the top three architectural debt items.\nFirst 60 days\nDeliver first architectural recommendation with implementation plan - typically cost optimization or scaling bottleneck.\nRefresh and own the observability stack.\nDocument the production runbook for the rest of the engineering team.\nFirst 90 days\nShip a measurable improvement: cost reduction, reliability uplift, deployment velocity, or scale headroom.\nDeliver the multi-tenant scale roadmap for the self-service motion.\nEstablish quarterly architecture review cadence with the engineering team.\nWhy Ombud\nYou'll own the platform that runs production AI for some of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. The infrastructure decisions you make will directly enable our 2026 strategy of moving from response management to autonomous revenue execution. You'll work with a small, senior engineering team that ships fast and trusts each other.\nABOUT OMBUD\nOmbud is a Denver-based B2B SaaS company building the agentic AI platform that powers Revenue Operations teams at enterprises like Workday, UKG, and Prudential. Our product, Ombuddy, automates the response work - RFPs, security questionnaires, proposals - that has historically eaten enterprise sales cycles. Our 2026 strategy is to extend this from response management into Orchestrated Revenue Operations: autonomous execution of the discrete sales processes that move revenue. Our 2035 BHAG is $1B ARR powering 80% of discrete B2B sales motions.\nWe run on EOS. We hire for output, not pedigree. We expect honesty over politeness, decisions over discussions, and execution over enthusiasm.\nHOW WE WORK - PIRCC VALUES\nProgressive - We grow. We learn. We push the model forward, not protect the status quo.\nIntegrity - We do the right thing and keep our commitments. Said and done are the same thing.\nResourceful - We turn constraints into creativity. We do more with less and bring solutions, not problems.\nCustomer-Centric - Our customers' success is the metric that matters. We anticipate their needs and earn their trust.\n Community - We build a team people want to be part of, and we invest in the communities we serve.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5644,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-10T21:19:09Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.231,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":130,"expected_fill_days":25,"reasons":["conf:3","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T17:38:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":28395,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":679982},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=679982"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/ombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fombud-principal-platform-engineer-kubernetes-cloud-infrastructure"}]}