Principal Platform Engineer & Team Lead

About us:

Intuitive is an innovation-led engineering company delivering business outcomes for 100’s of Enterprises globally. With the reputation of being a Tiger Team & a Trusted Partner of enterprise technology leaders, we help solve the most complex Digital Transformation challenges across following Intuitive Superpowers:

Modernization & Migration

• Application & Database Modernization
• Platform Engineering (IaC/EaC, DevSecOps & SRE)
• Cloud Native Engineering, Migration to Cloud, VMware Exit
• FinOps

Data & AI/ML

• Data (Cloud Native / DataBricks / Snowflake)
• Machine Learning, AI/GenAI

Cybersecurity

• Infrastructure Security
• Application Security
• Data Security
• AI/Model Security

SDx & Digital Workspace (M365, G-suite)

• SDDC, SD-WAN, SDN, NetSec, Wireless/Mobility
• Email, Collaboration, Directory Services, Shared Files Services

Intuitive Services:

• Professional and Advisory Services
• Elastic Engineering Services
• Managed Services
• Talent Acquisition & Platform Resell Services

About the job:

Title: Principal Platform Engineer & Team Lead

Start Date: Immediately

# of Positions: 1

Position Type: Contract

Location: Remote across USA/ Canada

About the Role

We are building an infrastructure management platform from scratch—and we need a Principal Platform Engineer who builds infrastructure, not just designs it. You will own the platform's core infrastructure capabilities: Terraform modules, Kubernetes clusters, networking, bare metal provisioning, and the automation that makes infrastructure self-service.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will write Terraform daily, debug networking issues, configure hypervisors, and set the technical bar for infrastructure engineering. You will work alongside a Principal Software Engineer who owns the application stack, while you own everything under it.

Key Responsibilities

As a Principal Platform Engineer and infrastructure lead, you will:

• Own infrastructure architecture and design for platform capabilities, ensuring they meet reliability, security, and operational requirements across compute, storage, networking, and IAM domains.
• Lead the design and implementation of infrastructure as code using Terraform, OpenTofu, and similar tools, including module design, state management, and infrastructure automation patterns.
• Define and document golden path workflows for common infrastructure operations, establishing standardized processes for provisioning, lifecycle management, scaling, and decommissioning.
• Architect container, virtualization, and bare metal infrastructure including Kubernetes, CNI, hypervisors, PXE boot, and data center infrastructure.
• Design networking and security infrastructure including VPC architecture, network policies, security groups, load balancing, and multi-region strategies.
• Drive platform engineering standards for infrastructure as code, DevOps practices, security hardening, and operational procedures, ensuring they are adopted across teams.
• Mentor and grow infrastructure engineers, providing clear technical direction on platform engineering principles, DevOps practices, and infrastructure architecture.
• Continuously improve platform capabilities by identifying infrastructure gaps, evaluating new technologies and practices, and driving adoption of platform engineering principles.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of infrastructure/platform engineering experience, with 4+ years in senior/ staff/ principal roles operating production infrastructure.
• Expert-level Terraform and OpenTofu proficiency—module design, state management, and building reusable infrastructure patterns.
• Deep Kubernetes experience including cluster operations, CNI, storage classes, RBAC, and troubleshooting production issues.
• Strong experience with virtualization—hypervisors, VM lifecycle, and virtualization platform configuration.
• Hands-on bare metal experience including PXE boot, provisioning automation, and hardware lifecycle management.
• Deep Linux expertise—internals, system administration, kernel concepts, filesystems, and process management.
• Strong networking knowledge including VPC design, security groups, load balancing, DNS, and firewall configuration.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and their core primitives: compute, storage, networking, and IAM.
• Proficiency with configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, or Puppet) and infrastructure automation patterns.
• Experience building observability for infrastructure—metrics, logging, alerting, and operational dashboards.
• Proven ability to own and operate complex infrastructure end-to-end, from design through production.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, setting infrastructure standards, and raising the bar for operational excellence.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure with guardrails.
• Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud experience with consistent infrastructure patterns across providers.
• Service mesh and advanced container networking experience (CNI, network policies).
• Data center operations experience including rack layout, cabling, and physical infrastructure.
• Experience with backup, disaster recovery, and snapshot automation strategies.
• Infrastructure security background—hardening, vulnerability management, and secure design.
• Prior experience at infrastructure or platform engineering companies.