Platform Engineer

Thank you for considering IT Concepts dba Kentro, where innovation drives opportunity and collaboration leads to success. Our dynamic community of experts is fully committed to advancing our customers' missions, fostering professional growth, and making a positive impact on our communities.

By joining our supportive community, you will find that Kentro is dedicated to your personal and professional development. Together, we can drive meaningful change, spark innovation, and achieve extraordinary milestones.

Kentro is seeking a seasoned Platform Engineer for our Innovation team who bridges experimentation and enterprise adoption, a systems thinker who turns emerging technology into operational advantage. This role requires a broad technical foundation, deep curiosity, and the judgment to balance creativity with compliance, scalability, and mission impact.

You will shape and deliver pioneering solutions that span cloud, data, AI, and automation, defining how Kentro and its clients harness technology to achieve measurable outcomes. Success means not just building prototypes but establishing repeatable patterns that evolve into standards across the enterprise.

Our Federal Government faces complex missions ranging from enabling services for citizens to defending against our adversaries on the battlefield. The Platform Engineer must be exceptionally talented, ambitious, and a self-motivated individual who possesses and applies broad technical skills to solve complex challenges with a passion for creating groundbreaking, integrated solutions. You will be instrumental in evaluating emerging technology, building distinguished solutions, development with a variety of software, platforms, cloud infrastructure and services, data, and AI. This role offers a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of technology adoption and solution design within Kentro.

Responsibilities:

• Focus: Solution Prototyping, Enterprise Infrastructure, Platform Engineering/Architecture
• Design and prototype innovative solutions that translate high-level challenges into working proofs of value and provide guidance to mature them into production-ready architectures.
• Demonstrate prototypes and proof of concepts to existing and potential customers virtually and in person.
• Design and orchestrate decoupled, API-first environments using cloud-native services (AWS, Azure, or GCP) to support a seamless flow between headless backends and diverse frontend consumers.
• Architect and maintain high-performance API Gateways and Service Meshes to ensure secure, low-latency communication across microservices and third-party integrations.
• Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) maturity (using tools like Terraform, Ansible, Azure Resource Manager, etc.) to ensure the platform is reproducible, scalable, and version-controlled.
• Implement comprehensive observability and distributed tracing (using tools like Prometheus, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.) to monitor the health of complex, decoupled systems and predict bottlenecks.
• Integrate and extend major enterprise platforms (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Databricks, and cloud ecosystems) to deliver connected, intelligent services.
• Build reference implementations, reusable accelerators, and automation patterns that scale innovation beyond individual projects.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to embed innovation practices, mentor engineers, and evangelize new capabilities across Kentro.
• Understand and apply architecture and security best practices from inception. Ensure solutions fit effectively within existing cloud or owned infrastructure landscape.
• Actively participate in the evaluation of new software, platforms, and solutions.
• Demonstrate exceptional problem-solving skills and deal effectively with ambiguity. Be self-sustained in your ability to dig into complex issues, rapidly learn and apply new technologies directly to problems or opportunities.

Preferred Responsibilities

Focus: Innovation and Specialized Tech

• Design, develop, and deploy innovative solutions across a variety of platforms from high-level business challenges or opportunities and dive into solving them through creative design, critical thinking, and collaboration.
• Evaluate, champion, and define adoption strategies for emerging technologies that align innovation with enterprise architecture, security, and compliance frameworks that offer genuine competitive advantage and organizational efficiency, and drive value.
• Utilize data, AI, and best practices with strong data literacy and knowledge of AI and ML concepts to enhance and optimize solutions for performance, intelligence, and organizational impact (using tools like n8n and Replit).
• Develop whitepapers and playbooks that contribute to our knowledge base and provide guidance and understanding of complex technical issues facing our customers and industry.
• Experience with architecture frameworks (E.g., TOGAF, DODAF) for designing, implementing, and managing systems

Location: Hybrid in McLean, VA

Requirements:
• Bachelor’s degree (BA/BS) in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.
• 7+ years of relevant experience.
• Enterprise Implementation Success – Proven track record delivering large scale, complex system integrations and operational optimizations across multi-vendor environments.
• Headless Architecture Expertise – Strong technical understanding of decoupled architectures, API-first methodologies, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Exceptional communication skills, writing and verbal.
• Exceptional problem solver with a proven ability to handle complex technical challenges and translate high-level direction into actionable, effective solutions.
• Ambitious and self-sustained highly motivated self-starter who is continually driven to learn and autonomously complete projects with little supervision.
• Platform versatility with hands-on experience working across multiple major enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Databricks, and Cloud Services.
• Technical breadth with strong foundational understanding how solutions interact across cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle) and traditional owned infrastructure in connected and air-gapped environments.
• Integration proficiency with experience building and maintaining platform-to-platform integrations.
• Security-minded with demonstrated ability to incorporate architectural and security best practices early in the development lifecycle.
• Creative thinker with a track record of leveraging technology in novel ways to create distinguished and impactful business solutions.
• Technical understanding of software architecture, lifecycle, scalability, sustainability, and cost.

Clearance:

• Active or ability to obtain and maintain Security Clearance is highly preferred.

Benefits:
The Company

We believe in generating success collaboratively, enabling long-term mission success, and building trust for the next challenge. With you as our partner, let’s solve challenges, think innovatively, and maximize impact. As a valued member of our team, you have the unique opportunity to work in a diverse range of technology and business career paths, all while supporting our nation and delivering innovative technology solutions. We are a close community of experts that pride ourselves on creating an environment defined by teamwork, dedication, and excellence.

We hold three ISO certifications (27001:2013, 20000-1:2011, 9001:2015) and two CMMI ML 3 ratings (DEV and SVC).

Industry Recognition

Growth | Inc 5000’s Fastest Growing Private Companies, DC Metro List Fastest Growing; Washington Business Journal: Fastest Growing Companies, Top Performing Small Technology Companies in Greater D.C.

Culture | Northern Virginia Technology Council Tech 100 Honoree; Virginia Best Place to Work; Washington Business Journal: Best Places to Work, Corporate Diversity Index Winner – Mid-Size Companies, Companies Owned by People of Color; Department of Labor’s HireVets for our work helping veterans transition; SECAF Award of Excellence finalist; Victory Military Friendly Brand; Virginia Values Veterans (V3); Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Corporate Breath Award

Benefits

We offer competitive benefits package including paid time off, healthcare benefits, supplemental benefits, 401k including an employer match, discount perks, rewards, and more. We invest in our employees – Every employee is eligible for education reimbursement for certifications, degrees, or professional development. Reimbursement amounts may fluctuate due to IRS limitations. We want you to grow as an expert and a leader and offer flexibility for you to take a course, complete a certification, or other professional growth and networking. We are committed to supporting your curiosity and sustaining a culture that prioritizes commitment to continuous professional development.

We work hard; we play hard. Kentro is committed to incorporating fun into every day. We dedicate funds for activities – virtual and in-person – e.g., we host happy hours, holiday events, fitness & wellness events, and annual celebrations. In alignment with our commitment to our communities, we also host and attend charity galas/events. We believe in appreciating your commitment and building a positive workspace for you to be creative, innovative, and happy.

Commitment Equal Opportunity Employment & VEVRAA

Kentro is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, status as a protected veteran or any other status protected by applicable federal, state or local law.

Kentro is strongly committed to compliance with VEVRAA and other applicable federal, state, and local laws governing equal employment opportunity. We have developed comprehensive policies and procedures to ensure our hiring practices align with these requirements.

As part of our VEVRAA compliance efforts, Kentro has established an equ