Senior Platform Engineer
Citian, a venture-backed SaaS company building traffic-safety and transportation software for state and local governments, is hiring its first dedicated platform engineer. They'll own CI/CD, AWS infrastructure as code, observability, on-call, and databases (PostgreSQL, Snowflake, S3), with an AI-first approach to internal tooling and agents.
- Compensation
- $130K–$180K
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 7+ years
- Category
- Devops
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related technical field
- 7+ years running production systems, 4+ of them on AWS (IAM, networking, RDS, S3, CloudWatch)
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation or similar)
- Designing and running CI/CD pipelines with reliable deploys and rollback (GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions or similar)
- Containers and orchestration (Docker; Kubernetes/EKS or ECS)
- Database administration in production (performance tuning, backup and restore, migrations)
- Observability: metrics, logs, traces and alerting
- Experience leading incident response and running postmortems
- Operating in a compliance environment (SOC 2, GovRAMP/FedRAMP, CJIS, HIPAA or similar): change control, access reviews, audit evidence
- Strong Python or TypeScript for building tools, and hands-on agentic coding (Claude Code or similar)
- Clear written communication; document what you build
Nice to have
- Snowflake administration (roles, warehouses, cost)
- AWS GovCloud, GovRAMP/FedRAMP or CJIS experience
- AWS security services (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Config, CloudTrail)
- Building agent tooling (MCP servers, Claude Code skills or similar)
- Experience with Datadog, Vercel, Auth0, Liquibase
- Data pipeline orchestration (Airflow/MWAA)
- Leading tooling migrations (CI/CD platform, ECS to EKS, or adopting Terraform)
Full description
Citian is a fast growing, venture backed SaaS technology company based in Washington, DC. Our software solutions revolutionize how our transportation and infrastructure systems – roads, rail, transit, bicycle, pedestrian – operate.
Our tech solutions:
- Reduce traffic fatalities
- Enhance pedestrian accessibility
- Empower system operators to save time & money
You’ll work with some of the brightest minds in the software and transportation industries. Our engineers and data scientists apply the latest in emerging tech, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to build smarter, more advanced tools for our diverse client base. We work with clients across the United States, with global ambitions in the years ahead.
Who You Are:
You're a senior engineer who makes production reliable and makes shipping safe and routine. As Citian's first dedicated platform engineer, you'll shape how we run CRASH and ADAPT, which state and local governments rely on every day. You take an AI-first approach: you multiply the rest of engineering by building tooling, automation, reusable skills and agents, rather than becoming a queue. You're a self-starter who takes ownership and works well across teams. You can work remotely within the US or hybrid in our Washington, D.C. office.
Expected Duties:
- Design, build and run CI/CD pipelines that reliably build, test, deploy and roll back our applications, with versioned releases and deployment records.
- Stand up on-call, runbooks and a lightweight incident process, and take part in the on-call rotation.
- Set up monitoring, error tracking and alerting for applications and scheduled data pipelines, so we find problems, including missed runs, before customers do.
- Own infrastructure as code, environments and cloud cost, including bringing hand-built infrastructure into code.
- Assess our tooling (CI/CD platform, container orchestration, infrastructure as code, branching and release strategy) and lead changes where they pay off.
- Administer PostgreSQL (RDS), Snowflake and S3, including backups, tested restores, access, performance and cost.
- Build internal tooling, reusable skills and agents that help engineers build, test, deploy and operate safely.
- Set service-level objectives with product and customer success, and report against them.
- Help build and operate AWS GovCloud environments for government customers with CJIS requirements.
- Set platform standards, build security controls into them with engineering leadership and our SOC 2 program, and mentor engineers on operating what they build.