VP, Platform Engineering

Location: Fully onsite at facilities in Centennial, Colorado or Long Beach, California

Base salary: $185,000–$390,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous spacecraft, advanced payloads, mission software, and space-based interceptors for space security and defense.

What you will do

• Build and lead the Platform Engineering organization from the ground up, hiring managers and scaling the team to more than 24 people in 2026.
• Own the compute infrastructure strategy across commercial, CUI, and classified environments, including cloud, containers, networking, and CI/CD.
• Define and deliver DoD Impact Level 5 and IL-6 accredited compute environments and develop reusable internally owned platforms.
• Lead AI enablement infrastructure, including the AI platform, data infrastructure, and enterprise AI tooling.
• Lead the Systems Working Group for technology evaluation, approval, and standardization.
• Partner with engineering leaders, program teams, and government customers to scale infrastructure with the contract pipeline.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering, including 5+ years leading organizations of 15+ people across multiple disciplines.
• Hands-on expertise with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, container orchestration, networking, and CI/CD at scale.
• Direct experience building and operating DoD Impact Level 5 or higher accredited environments, with knowledge of NIST 800-53, STIGs, RMF, and ATO processes.
• Experience building engineering organizations from scratch and managing teams across classification levels with mixed clearance requirements.
• Strong executive communication skills for representing infrastructure strategy to government customers, program leaders, and C-suite stakeholders.
• Must be eligible under U.S. ITAR requirements as a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or person eligible to obtain the required authorizations.

Nice to have

• Experience in aerospace, defense, or national security technology companies.
• Background in AI/ML platforms, data engineering, networking, and SRE/DevOps.
• Experience with multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, including on-premises, GovCloud, and disconnected environments.
• High-growth startup experience from Series B through IPO.
• Experience with platform engineering “paved roads” operating models.
• Active U.S. Top Secret or TS/SCI clearance.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, and HRA/HSA options.
• Paid time off and paid holidays.
• 401(k) and parental leave.
• Equity participation.
• Standard office and production-factory work environment.