Principal Platform Engineer

ELLKAY started out providing connectivity solutions to laboratories and within a few years, grew to also provide data management solutions to ambulatory organizations. ELLKAY is now a trusted data management partner in five healthcare segments. ELLKAY’s solutions continue to serve laboratories and ambulatory practices and have expanded to empower hospitals and health systems, healthcare IT vendors, ambulatory practices, health plans, and other healthcare organizations with cutting-edge technologies and solutions that drive their growth and interoperability strategies.

Today, ELLKAY remains true to our core values, building strong partner relationships and offering unparalleled service and support while providing innovative, scalable solutions to the challenges our customers face in today’s data-rich world.

ELLKAY's experience, customer-focused approach, and reputation for innovation, speed, and accuracy differentiate ELLKAY as a premier partner for your interoperability needs and data management strategy.

Job Description:

We're looking for a Principal Platform Engineer to own the design, build, and operational health of our infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who thinks in systems, codifies everything, and is equally comfortable writing Terraform modules, debugging a production incident at 2 AM, and advising leadership on cost and security posture.

You will be the primary technical bridge between Platform Engineering and our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams, setting the standards for how services are deployed, observed, secured, and operated at scale across hybrid cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

Infrastructure as Code

Design, build, and maintain reusable Terraform modules to provision and manage infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and on-prem environments

Establish IaC standards, module versioning strategy, state management practices, and review processes across engineering teams

Drive migration of manually managed infrastructure to fully codified, version-controlled definitions

Deployment Pipelines & Containerized Services

Architect and implement CI/CD pipelines for containerized and Kubernetes-based services, from build through progressive production rollout

Define deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling) and the automation that supports them

Partner with development teams to streamline the path from commit to production while maintaining safety and auditability

Configuration Management

Own configuration management tooling and practices across hybrid environments (e.g., Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or equivalent) to ensure consistency, repeatability, and drift detection

Standardize secrets management, environment configuration, and golden image/baseline practices across cloud and on-prem fleets

Observability

Design and implement observability patterns (metrics, logging, tracing) that provide actionable signal across distributed, hybrid-cloud services

Define SLIs/SLOs in partnership with SRE and product teams, and build the dashboards and alerting that make them actionable

Reduce mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) through better instrumentation, not just more of it

Production Reliability

Act as a senior escalation point for complex production incidents, driving root cause analysis and durable remediation

Lead or contribute to postmortems and translate findings into infrastructure, process, or tooling improvements

Proactively identify and remediate reliability risk before it becomes an incident

Cost & Security Governance

Design and implement cost governance practices — tagging standards, budget alerting, rightsizing, and reserved capacity strategy across AWS, Azure, and on-prem infrastructure

Partner with Security to define and enforce infrastructure security guardrails (IAM least-privilege, network segmentation, secrets handling, compliance controls)

Build automated policy enforcement (e.g., policy-as-code) so governance scales with infrastructure rather than depending on manual review

Cross-Team Leadership

Serve as the primary point of contact between Platform Engineering and SRE teams, aligning on standards, priorities, and shared tooling

Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on infrastructure design, operational excellence, and IaC best practices

Influence infrastructure architecture and technical roadmap at the organizational level

Qualifications:

15+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles, with demonstrated staff-level scope and impact

Deep, production-grade experience with both AWS and Azure , plus experience managing on-premises infrastructure in a hybrid model

Expert-level Terraform experience — module design, state management, workspace/environment strategy at scale

Strong experience building CI/CD pipelines for Kubernetes and Docker -based workloads

Hands-on experience with configuration management tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar)

Proven track record implementing observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Splunk) and defining meaningful SLIs/SLOs

Demonstrated experience leading production incident response and driving reliability improvements

Experience designing cloud cost governance and security/compliance frameworks in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment

Strong scripting/programming ability (Python, Go, or Bash) for automation and tooling

Excellent cross-functional communication — able to work directly with SRE, security, and engineering leadership

Preferred

Experience with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA/Gatekeeper, Sentinel)

Relevant certifications (AWS, Azure, CKA/CKAD)

Experience operating infrastructure under regulatory or compliance requirements (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001)

Prior experience in an on-call rotation for critical production systems

History of mentoring engineers or leading infrastructure initiatives across multiple teams

Benefits:

ELLKAY offers a comprehensive and competitive benefit package that starts day one!

Including:

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

Employer-paid Life and LTD

401k w/ matching – once eligibility is met

Work/life balance

Paid Volunteer Program

Flexible working hours

Generous FTO

Remote work options

Employee Discounts

Parental Leave

Gym membership / Exercise class stipends

Our awesome culture includes:

Working with talented, collaborative, and friendly people who love what they do

Professional growth within

Innovation environment

On site in HQ Free daily lunches

Awards:

2025 Top Workplaces Employee Appreciation

2025 Top Workplaces Employee Well-Being

2025 Top Workplaces Professional Development

2025 Top Workplaces Leadership

2026 USA Today Top Workplaces

2026 NJ Top Workplaces

Additional information

At ELLKAY, we are committed to operating as a hybrid workplace, offering employees flexibility in how they structure their time between in-office and remote work. We recognize the significance of fostering connections, collaboration, and creativity within our office culture and its positive impact on our business. Our philosophy of operating as a hybrid workplace underscores our dedication to enabling employees to tailor work-life balance to their individual preferences. For those who do not live within 40 miles of one of our offices, we are open to considering remote work for candidates whose skills and experience strongly align with the role. While we prioritize a hybrid work environment for most roles, we understand the importance of flexibility and are open to remote work for specific positions and specialized skill sets.

For more information on our company, visit www.ELLKAY.com.

ELLKAY LLC is a Smoke-Free Workplace.

ELLKAY, LLC provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Compensation Range: $160,000-$180,000