Remote Automation Architect Jobs in Washington, DC

JOB SUMMARY 

As a member of an agile scrum team, the Infrastructure Platform Engineering Architect will design and build production-grade platform services that enable developers to provision and operate infrastructure through well-defined APIs and automation. A core responsibility of this role is developing, maintaining, and advancing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) capabilities, leveraging tools such as Terraform and policy as code frameworks, to automate infrastructure provisioning, management, and policy.   The architect should be able to craft a vision informed by deep experience and industry best practices to design and integrate platform automation in alignment with enterprise KPIs, and be hands-on contributing to code, documentation, and planning to execute this vision. 

This position is ideal for a Platform Engineering Architect who has built and operated backend services and expanded into infrastructure/platform engineering. You will apply software engineering best practices (API design, testing, versioning, reliability, and maintainability) to an internal infrastructure and policy orchestration API, the automation it drives, and IaC modules and workflows. You will also partner closely with infrastructure, security, and developer experience teams to deliver secure, compliant, observable, and scalable capabilities that abstract cloud complexity behind simple, well-documented interfaces. 

CANDIDATE PROFILE 

Required Qualifications 

• Undergraduate degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification 

• 8+ years' progressive technology experience with a blend of deep technical knowledge and a customer-focused mindset that includes: 

• 5+ years' experience designing, building, and operating backend services and APIs in production (platform, developer tooling, or internal services). 

• 5+ years' experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred) and building automation around it (modules, remote state, and versioning). 

• 5+ years' experience with Public Cloud technology stacks such as AWS, Azure, GCP or Alibaba. 

• 5+ years' experience driving highly technical architecture, and driving outcomes with automation  

• 3+ years' experience with CI/CD platforms (Harness preferred) and automating build/test/security/deploy/release pipelines. 

• 5+ years' experience designing, building, and operating GitOps processes. 

• 5+ years in an engineering role as a strategic thinker that relates technology solutions to customer use cases 

• Hands-on experience designing and developing APIs/services using languages such as Go or Python, including RESTful design, request/response modeling, and service integration. 

• Experience designing service contracts and developer-facing interfaces (OpenAPI/Swagger, SDKs/clients, schema evolution, and backward compatibility). 

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (data structures/algorithms, clean code, design patterns, and code reviews). 

• Experience building reliable services (e.g., retries, idempotency, timeouts, rate limiting, circuit breakers) and debugging distributed systems. 

• Strong testing discipline (unit/integration tests, contract tests, and CI/CD automation for application code). 

• Deep knowledge of infrastructure concepts and cloud fundamentals (networking, IAM, compute, storage), with the ability to collaborate effectively with infrastructure engineers. 

• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex production issues across services and infrastructure. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with workflow orchestration and asynchronous/distributed systems (e.g., Temporal), including retries, idempotency, and failure handling. 

• Experience building or contributing to platform services, internal developer platforms (IDPs), or service-oriented architectures that expose infrastructure capabilities via APIs. 

• Experience with API security patterns (authentication/authorization, secrets management, and audit logging) and enterprise integration requirements. 

• Production experience with observability (structured logging, metrics, tracing), on-call practices, SLOs/SLIs, and incident response. 

• Proven experience implementing automated testing frameworks for Terraform code (e.g., Terratest). 

• Experience with policy as code (Open Policy Agent/OPA) and implementing guardrails for security, compliance, and governance. 

• 3+ years' Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and/or service mesh ecosystems. 

• Contributions to open-source software (platform, tooling, or infrastructure projects). 

• Excellent technical knowledge of current & emerging infrastructure systems & standards. 

• Ability to create constructive relationships, influence, and communicate (to product team, engineering management, and non-technical staff). 

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES  

Platform Architecture & API Strategy 

• Define and evolve the architecture for internal infrastructure and policy orchestration APIs, ensuring scalability, reliability, and ease of consumption across engineering teams. 

• Establish clear API contracts, versioning strategies, and backward compatibility standards for platform services. 

• Define and enforce architectural boundaries between platform services and developer-facing orchestration layers, establishing stable, well-defined APIs ensuring clean separation of concerns and minimizing coupling that enable independent team velocity. 

• Drive alignment with internal developer platform and orchestration teams to standardize integration patterns and service ownership models. 

Infrastructure & Policy Automation Strategy 

• Define and drive the enterprise strategy for Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and policy-as-code (OPA), including module lifecycle, testing frameworks, enforcement points, and integration into platform workflows. 

• Establish and standardize reusable, production-grade infrastructure modules and automation patterns designed for scale and enterprise adoption. 

• Lead the design of infrastructure workflows and orchestration patterns that abstract cloud complexity behind simplified APIs and automation. 

Standards, Governance & Guardrails 

• Define and implement "Guardrails as Code" by translating security, compliance, and governance requirements into enforceable, reusable policy frameworks using OPA. 

• Establish governance models for infrastructure provisioning, policy enforcement, and platform consumption across the enterprise. 

• Define and maintain "Golden Paths" (opinionated, pre-approved infrastructure patterns informed by Enterprise Architectures) to drive standardization, reduce drift, and accelerate delivery. 

• Partner with Security, Compliance, Enterprise Architecture, and Cloud Foundations teams to ensure platform capabilities meet enterprise control requirements.  

Platform Adoption & Enablement 

• Drive adoption of platform services across engineering teams, enabling the transition from direct cloud access to API-driven infrastructure provisioning models via the Internal Development Platform. 

• Define onboarding strategies, adoption roadmaps, and enablement plans to ensure successful platform rollout at scale. 

• Develop high-quality documentation, reference architectures, and training materials that promote self-service and consistent usage patterns. 

• Engage with engineering teams to gather feedback, identify gaps, and continuously improve platform usability and effectiveness. 

• Continuously evolve platform capabilities based on usage patterns, developer feedback, and operational insights to improve usability, effectiveness, and adoption. 

Operational Excellence & Reliability 

• Define standards and best practices for reliability, scalability, performance, and observability of platform services and infrastructure automation. 

• Establish expectations for production readiness, including CI/CD, testing strategies, monitoring, alerting, and incident response. 

• Drive improvements to platform performance and reliability through continuous evaluation and optimization. 

Technical Leadership & Cross-Team Influence 

• Partner closely with the Technical Product Owner to decompose platform initiatives into well-defined, distributable workstreams, while providing technical guidance and direction to engineers to ensure coordinated delivery against overall team objectives. 

• Serve as a technical authority for platform architecture and infrastructure automation, guiding design decisions across multiple teams. 

• Lead architecture and design reviews for platform services, infrastructure modules, and policy frameworks. 

• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to engineers, promoting best practices in platform engineering, API design, and infrastructure automation. 

• Influence enterprise technology direction by evaluating emerging trends and recommending platform-level improvements. 

MANAGING PROJECTS AND PRIORITIES 

• Collaborate closely with other leads on defining and driving the technical roadmap for platform engineering capabilities, aligning with enterprise priorities and developer needs. 

• Define priorities, plans, and resource requirements to deliver platform initiatives at scale and on schedule.  

• Balance long-term platform investments with short-term delivery needs, ensuring sustainable evolution of platform capabilities. 

• Drive cross-team coordination and prioritization across platform engineering, security, compliance, and developer experience teams. 

• Analyze current environments and identify gaps, inefficiencies, or risks, recommending scalable solutions for improvement.  

DELIVERING ON THE NEEDS OF KEY STAKEHOLDERS 

• Partner with stakeholders across Security, Compliance, Enterprise Architecture, Cloud Foundations, and other Platform teams to align on standards, policy enforcement, and platform capabilities.  

• Translate enterprise requirements (security, compliance, cost, and operational needs) into scalable platform abstractions and automation. 

• Communicate technical concepts, platform capabilities, and architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. 

• Drive alignment across teams by influencing architecture decisions and promoting standardized approaches to infrastructure and policy automation.