IT Platform Engineering Manager

IT Platform Engineering Manager

Rockville, MD

Axle is a bioscience and information technology company that offers advancements in translational research, biomedical informatics, and data science applications to research centers and healthcare organizations nationally and abroad. With experts in biomedical science, software engineering, and program management, we focus on developing and applying research tools and techniques to empower decision-making and accelerate research discoveries. We work with some of the top research organizations and facilities in the country including multiple institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Position Overview

We are seeking an IT Platform Engineering Manager with strong DevSecOps expertise to lead our platform engineering team and own the reliability, security, and scalability of our cloud and containerized infrastructure. This is a hands-on leadership role combining people management, technical direction, and production operations. This is a hybrid position - local to the DC Metro Area.

• You will partner with development, security (HIPAA and FedRamp High), and business stakeholders to set platform priorities, improve the developer experience, and embed security throughout the software delivery lifecycle. You will guide the team while contributing directly to architecture, automation, and complex troubleshooting.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the platform engineering team through hiring, coaching, performance management, and clear ownership of delivery and operational responsibilities.
• Own the platform roadmap and engineering standards. Prioritize work, manage team capacity, and communicate progress, dependencies, and technical risks to stakeholders.
• Oversee and contribute to production Kubernetes operations, including cluster upgrades, Helm deployments, workload optimization, capacity planning, and application availability.
• Establish DevSecOps practices across CI/CD pipelines, including code, dependency, container, and infrastructure scanning; secrets management; and risk-based vulnerability remediation.
• Guide AWS architecture and infrastructure security, including identity and access management, network segmentation, system hardening, and secure container design.
• Standardize infrastructure provisioning and configuration through reusable Terraform modules, scripting, and version-controlled deployment workflows that reduce manual work.
• Own observability and operational readiness. Define service reliability objectives and maintain actionable monitoring, alerting, logs, runbooks, and tested recovery procedures.
• Lead incident response and technical escalations, coordinate stakeholder communications, and turn root-cause findings into improvements that prevent recurring failures.
• Manage infrastructure costs and capacity, contribute to budget planning, and evaluate tools and vendors against security, reliability, and business requirements.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience managing or leading platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, or SRE teams, including mentoring engineers and delivering technical initiatives.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience managing production Kubernetes clusters, including operations, troubleshooting, upgrades, and workload optimization.
• Strong proficiency with Helm charts for application deployment and configuration management.
• Extensive experience with Docker and Docker Compose, including multi-container architectures, image optimization, and secure container design.
• Advanced Linux administration skills across multiple distributions, including package management, networking, storage, permissions, and system performance.
• Strong troubleshooting skills for network, DNS, API, and service connectivity issues in distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with log management, monitoring, and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch.
• Advanced scripting skills in Bash, Python, or similar languages for automation, tooling, and system integrations.
• Proven experience with system hardening, security best practices, and vulnerability remediation across cloud infrastructure and containerized environments.
• Proficiency with AWS services and tools, including EKS, EC2, IAM, CloudWatch, Security Groups, and VPC networking.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security checks, and reliable deployment and rollback processes.
• Proficiency with Terraform, including reusable modules, state management, and integration into infrastructure deployment workflows.
• Strong communication and planning skills, with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, delegate effectively, and align engineering work with business priorities.

What You Will Bring

You combine technical depth with thoughtful people leadership. You make security part of everyday engineering, use automation to reduce operational overhead, and help engineers grow through clear expectations and useful feedback. You remain calm during incidents and build productive relationships across development, security, and operations.

Eligibility Requirement

Employment in this position is limited to U.S. Persons as defined by federal regulations. Only U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, lawful permanent residents, asylees, and refugees are eligible.

Salary Range

$150,000 - $180,000 USD