Senior Platform Engineer

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.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a 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): breaking work into agent-sized tasks, writing specs and tests agents can work against, and reviewing agent output critically

Clear written communication; you document what you build

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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)
• Tools we use today (Datadog, Vercel, Auth0, Liquibase)
• Data pipeline orchestration (Airflow/MWAA)
• Leading tooling migrations (for example CI/CD platform, ECS to EKS, or adopting Terraform)
• Your Citian Advantage: Competitive salary and benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance and generous PTO.
• 401(k) company match and monthly commuter transportation benefit
• On-site gym and free snacks in the office
• High-growth potential and opportunities for advancement within a fast growing, venture-backed SaaS startup!
• Let's build smarter cities together! Learn more about Citian here: www.citian.co
• ** Citian is an organization committed to diversity and inclusion to drive our business results and create a better future every day for our diverse employees, clients, partners, and communities. We believe a diverse workforce allows us to match our growth ambitions and drive inclusion across the business. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.
• Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer Minorities/Females/Protected Veterans/Persons with Disabilities