Principal Platform Engineer

Job description

At Atom Computing, we build quantum computers using arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms that will empower customers to achieve unprecedented computational breakthroughs. Join a world-class team of scientists, engineers, and business professionals to advance the state-of-the-art in quantum computing. Atom Computing is seeking a Principal Platform Engineer to build and operate the systems that power our quantum computing and research workflows. In this role, you will design and design infrastructure spanning on-prem lab environments and cloud platforms, driving key trade-off decisions across reliability, security, scalability, and cost. This position requires solid expertise in infrastructure and platform engineering and strong systems thinking, along with the ability to navigate complex design problems. Due to the need for collaboration with Atom's software, hardware, and control systems teams, this role is required to be in the office in Boulder, CO at least 3 days per week. ### Job Responsibilities - Design, build, and maintain classical compute infrastructure supporting quantum control systems - Work closely with Atom Computing's software engineers, control systems engineers, and physicists to understand workload requirements and deliver compute infrastructure that meets them - Own infrastructure-as-code, deployment automation, and system observability across on-prem lab environments and cloud platforms - Establish and enforce security, access control, and compliance standards (e.g., NIST 800-53, SOC2) across systems - Participate in on-call rotation and drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements - Evaluate and integrate new infrastructure tooling, balancing build-vs-buy decisions against team velocity and operational overhead ### Experience & Education - BS or advanced degree in Computer Science - 7+ years of post-degree experience as an infrastructure, platform, or systems engineer ### Qualifications - Have gone through a complete infrastructure build-out or major platform migration - Currently working with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or similar) - Currently working with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Podman, Kubernetes) - Experience managing hybrid environments spanning on-prem hardware (Proxmox, K8S) and cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) - Knowledge of networking fundamentals, Linux systems administration, and CI/CD pipeline design - Expertise in monitoring, logging, and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent)