Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Second Front Systems is looking for an infrastructure-focused, compliance-minded, operationally disciplined Platform Engineer to strengthen our Platform Engineering function across European regulated environments. This role sits at the intersection of systems, tooling, and engineering — translating infrastructure reliability and deployment velocity into warfighter-ready software delivery.

🏢 About Second Front Systems

Second Front is a venture-backed company on a mission to strengthen global security by accelerating access to emerging technologies for the U.S. and our allies. Founded by Marines who saw firsthand how outdated government acquisition systems held back frontline personnel, we help commercial software companies get mission-critical technology into the hands of government users faster — backed by FedRAMP High, DoD IL2–IL6/JWICS, GovRAMP, UK MOD, and NATO authorizations. Our team is mission-obsessed, collaborative, and decisive, and we’re proud to be Great Place to Work® certified.

🎯 The Role

You’ll be responsible for deploying, operating, and maintaining Game Warden across EMEA cloud environments while establishing secure, repeatable platform patterns that satisfy sovereignty and assurance requirements. You’ll build landing zones and reference architectures using infrastructure-as-code and cloud-native tooling, keeping European deployments aligned with our global platform patterns while preserving accreditation inheritance across target environments.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Deploy Game Warden and other Second Front products across AWS, Azure, GCP, and sovereign-cloud infrastructure in European regions, to specification.
• Architect landing zones that satisfy sovereignty, customer-control, and GDPR requirements without single-vendor lock-in.
• Govern Kubernetes, container runtimes, and infrastructure-as-code tooling to enforce repeatability across deployments.
• Drive CI/CD, networking, identity, observability, and security controls against target-environment constraints and threat models.
• Implement the technical controls and documentation required for EAL, FedRAMP, GovRAMP, NATO, UK MOD, or equivalent customer accreditation regimes.
• Translate engineering tooling requirements into platform specifications, ensuring CI/CD, containerization, and accreditation workflows meet time-sensitive delivery windows.
• Work with platform and engineering leads to resolve conflicts between automation, hardening, and operational constraints.
• Sequence platform rollouts and upgrades to minimize disruption to active development while maintaining compliance posture and system hardening.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on platform engineering, DevSecOps, cloud infrastructure, SRE, or systems engineering experience in production environments.
• Deep fluency with AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent cloud platforms operating at scale.
• Production-grade Kubernetes and container orchestration experience in live systems.
• Hands-on experience writing and maintaining infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
• A track record building, securing, and operating CI/CD pipelines under regulatory or high-assurance compliance requirements.
• Working knowledge of networking, IAM, SAML/OAuth, APIs, and distributed-systems troubleshooting in production.
• Fluent English and a proven ability to collaborate asynchronously across distributed global engineering teams.
• EU citizenship (any of the 27 EU member states) and the right to work in the EU.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Existing government or NATO security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.
• Experience operating in air-gapped, classified, or other high-assurance environments.
• Familiarity with EAL/Common Criteria, FedRAMP, GovRAMP, NATO, or UK MOD accreditation processes; and/or familiarity with other frameworks such as NIS-2, CRA, etc.
• Proficiency in a systems or scripting language (e.g., Go, Python, or Rust) for building internal tooling.

🎁 Benefits

The base salary for this position will fall between €120,000 and €140,000. Your ultimate compensation will be determined by professional background, technical proficiency, seniority, and regional cost factors. This role is also eligible for equity awards and discretionary bonuses as part of a broader total rewards package.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Candidates must hold citizenship in an EU member state, along with the right to work in the European Union, and be based in the EU (Remote). Unlike some of our other EU-based roles, this position requires citizenship rather than residency alone, given the security clearance and accreditation requirements tied to the systems this role supports. Candidates from any of the 27 EU member states are eligible, and you may be located anywhere in the EU.