Junior Platform Engineer
Clarity Innovations · Columbia, MD
$46,000–$150,000from the description
Jul 15, 2026
Columbia, MD
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A junior-level role focused on building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, containerized applications, and cloud infrastructure across a large enterprise environment. The work spans automation and orchestration using tools such as Jenkins, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker, with cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, or GCP. A security-first approach is expected throughout. Suits early-career engineers with hands-on exposure to DevSecOps practices and cloud services.
Mid level · 1+ years · Remote · Secret clearance
Advertised as Junior, but the requirements read as Mid.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (10)
The title says 'Junior' but the posting requires 1+ years of cloud/CI-CD/containerization experience plus hands-on programming, IaC, and enterprise-scale pipeline ownership — scope and breadth are more consistent with a Mid-level role.
Clearance is stated as 'Secret or Clearable,' meaning candidates who can obtain a Secret clearance are acceptable; the gate is on eligibility, not necessarily an active clearance.
The salary range ($46K–$150K) is unusually wide, spanning Junior through Senior bands, which is consistent with the posting being used to fill multiple levels or with a staffing/contracting context.
The degree requirement accepts 4 years of additional experience in lieu of a degree, so no formal degree is hard-gated.
An 8140 (DoD Directive 8140/8570) certification is listed as an expectation but is not explicitly called a hard gate; it is likely required for the cleared government-contract context.
Python, DSL, JSON, and YAML are listed together as 'one or more of the following'; Python is used as the primary skill name with the others captured as alternatives, since they serve the same scripting/config requirement in this context.
The specific AWS services (IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, EC2, S3, Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, RDS) appear as a contextual stack list rather than individually gated requirements, so they are marked preferred.
Role is classified as Software Developers (15-1252) because the primary work is building, automating, and shipping CI/CD pipelines and containerized applications; 15-1244 (Systems Administrators) is the runner-up given the infrastructure operations context.
Requires a Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
This posting reads as a fully-remote role, so it was scored against the national candidate pool rather than a single metro.
Read the full posting
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