Senior Engineer, Platform Security and Reliability

Senior Engineer I, Platform Security and Reliability, Modeling and Simulation 

Remote or on-site (Alameda, CA) 

Kairos Power 

Kairos Power is a new nuclear energy technology and engineering company whose mission is to enable the world’s transition to clean energy, with the ultimate goal to dramatically improve people’s quality of life while protecting the environment. This goal will be accomplished through the commercialization of the fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (FHR) that can be deployed with robust safety, affordable costs, and flexible operation to accommodate the expansion of variable renewables. 

Job Summary 

Kairos Power is looking for a Senior Platform Security and Reliability Engineer to work within a small software and infrastructure team that supports the needs of our design, research, and development organizations. This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will own the security baseline and the reliability posture of the cloud and high-performance computing platforms that engineering teams depend on, and you will build the controls, automation, and recovery mechanisms that keep those platforms both defensible and dependable. 

You will set technical direction for platform security controls across AWS and Google Cloud, for identity and secrets management, for machine image security, for network security, and for observability architecture. You will lead the migration of legacy cloud workloads and the retirement of duplicative services, and you will own the cost visibility and resource guardrails that keep cloud and high-performance computing spend predictable. You will lead response to both availability and security incidents, and communicate clearly with the engineers and stakeholders who depend on these services. The group favors simple, proportionate designs assembled from standard, well-supported technologies, and this role is expected to be a leading voice for that standard. Success means becoming the trusted technical owner of platform security and reliability, with systems that can be operated and maintained by engineers other than their original author. 

Responsibilities 

Security baseline and platform controls 

• Define, implement, and maintain the security baseline for cloud and Linux platforms, including operating system hardening, benchmark configuration, and secure defaults for new environments. 

• Own platform security controls in AWS and Google Cloud, including account and project structure, guardrails, service configuration, logging, and both preventative and detective controls. 

• Design and enforce least-privilege access patterns across cloud accounts, Linux systems, and internally hosted engineering services. 

• Own the security of machine image pipelines, including image hardening, vulnerability scanning, patch currency, automated image testing, versioned releases, and rollback. 

• Assess new platform technologies for security impact before adoption, and document the reasoning behind each decision. 

Identity, secrets, and certificates 

• Own identity and access management across cloud and self-hosted services, including authentication, authorization, federation, and periodic access review. 

• Manage the full lifecycle of secrets, including storage, distribution, rotation, and revocation, and eliminate credentials embedded in code or configuration. 

• Own certificate lifecycle, including issuance, automated renewal, expiry monitoring, and trust chain management. 

• Automate access provisioning and deprovisioning so that entitlements reflect current need rather than accumulated history. 

Compliance automation 

• Translate internal security requirements into automated checks that run continuously rather than as periodic manual review. 

• Build and maintain resource inventory and configuration data across cloud and self-hosted systems, so that coverage gaps are visible rather than assumed. 

• Automate the collection of control evidence and the reporting of exceptions, and reduce the manual effort required to demonstrate that controls are working. 

• Track identified findings to closure, and drive recurring findings toward systemic fixes rather than repeated manual remediation. 

Reliability, recovery, and incident leadership 

• Define service health indicators and service-level objectives for platform services, and hold the platform to them. 

• Engineer automated recovery and self-healing so that routine failure modes resolve without human intervention. 

• Own backup, restoration, and disaster recovery for critical services, including restoration procedures that are documented, rehearsed, and verified. 

• Lead response to availability and security incidents: coordinate diagnosis and containment, communicate status and impact to affected engineers, and drive follow-up actions to closure. 

• Run blameless post-incident review, and convert findings into concrete engineering work rather than advisory notes. 

Observability architecture 

• Own the observability architecture for platform services, including metrics, logs, retention, and access. 

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