Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation’s interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.
Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.
We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.
The position is part of a team of software and platform engineers building a unified, multi-tenant control plane that abstracts away infrastructure differences across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments. The platform allows application teams to provision secure, isolated Kubernetes clusters and workloads dynamically. The control plane runs Crossplane and Cluster API (CAPI).
As a Senior Principal Software Engineer on this program, you will bridge the gap between cloud infrastructure and custom software engineering. Instead of writing standard application code or static infrastructure-as-code scripts, your primary responsibility is extending the Kubernetes API using Go to build the automation layer that controls the infrastructure.
The ideal candidate is highly independent, capable of driving projects from inception to completion with minimal supervision, and has a keen eye for detail. They should be passionate about innovation, continuously seeking to improve processes and contribute meaningfully to the platform’s evolution. Additionally, the role offers opportunities to make impactful contributions to a widely used system, directly influencing its functionality and reliability. The successful candidate will work in a dynamic environment, collaborating with teams to ensure the platform meets the highest standards of performance and security.
Control Plane Engineering & Extensibility
Develop Go-Based Crossplane Extensions: Write, test, and maintain custom Go-based Crossplane Composition Functions to replace or augment static YAML compositions with sophisticated runtime logic.
API & CRD Design: Design, implement, and version Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) that abstract complex infrastructure configurations into intuitive declarative interfaces for application teams.
Implement Phased Orchestration Logic: Code advanced sequencing, dependency mapping, and health-validation loops using Crossplane's Usages and Validation APIs to eliminate infrastructure provisioning race conditions.
Upstream Contributions & Integrations: Maintain and customize Cluster API (CAPI) providers and Crossplane providers (specifically AWS, Azure, and CAPMOX for Proxmox), contributing patches upstream where applicable.
Engineering Excellence
Define Operator Standards: Establish best practices for writing custom controllers, managing the Kubernetes Controller Runtime, ensuring efficient queueing, and preventing infinite reconciliation loops.
Peer Mentorship: Partner with and mentor "Sysadmin-turned-DevOps" engineers to help them build proficiency in Go, write robust unit/integration tests for operators, and adopt software-first approaches to infrastructure.
Maintain Architecture Records: Contribute to and execute Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) regarding API specifications, library usage, and controller framework selections.
Technical Skills & Experience
Advanced Go (Golang) Proficiency: 3+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Go code, with a deep understanding of concurrency patterns (goroutines, channels) and profiling.
Kubernetes Internals & Operator Pattern: Strong hands-on experience using the controller-runtime library, client-go, Operator SDK, or Kubebuilder to build custom controllers and operators.
Cloud-Native Infrastructure Automation: Experience building and managing infrastructure declaratively, ideally with control-plane-based provisioning tools like Crossplane.
GitOps & Continuous Delivery: Proficiency with GitOps workflows and continuous delivery practices, using tools like Flux, Helm, and Kustomize to manage infrastructure lifecycles.
Soft Skills & Engineering Mindset
Systems Thinker: Ability to view physical hardware and hyperscale clouds not as static targets, but as endpoints controlled by software APIs.
Collaboration & Communication: Strong capability to bridge the gap between pure application developers and traditional infrastructure engineers, speaking comfortably to both.
Ruthless Solver of Race Conditions: An investigative mindset capable of debugging complex, asynchronous distributed systems where resources depend on sequential, timed events.
Extreme Ownership: A proven track record of acting as a technical steward for a product or subsystem, where you care as much about the operational metrics, edge-case failures, and technical debt of the system as you do about delivering new features.
Defensive Engineering Mindset: An engineering approach that assumes distributed systems will fail asynchronously. You naturally build deep observability, robust error handling, self-healing reconcile loops, and fallback mechanisms into your Go controllers.
Traceability and Documentation: A commitment to maintaining clear architectural records (ADRs), comprehensive unit/integration test suites, and clear API documentation, ensuring that your subsystem can be safely maintained by other engineers.
Live-Production Incident Response: Hands-on experience managing incident response lifecycles and resolving critical failures within live, high-scale production systems.
Telemetry-Driven Debugging: Advanced capability in utilizing telemetry, distributed tracing, and metrics to perform root-cause analysis and resolve complex issues in live production environments.
API Lifecycle & Maintenance: Proven track record in managing long-term API maintenance, including defining upgrade processes and implementing n-1 compatibility testing to ensure seamless version transitions.
Skills Required
- 3+ years professional production Go (Golang) development
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes internals and operator pattern using controller-runtime, client-go, Operator SDK, or Kubebuilder
- Experience building Crossplane-based control plane automation and writing Crossplane Composition Functions
- Experience with Cluster API (CAPI) providers and contributing/customizing providers
- Familiarity with CAPMOX/Proxmox provider and cloud providers (AWS, Azure)
- Proficiency with GitOps and continuous delivery practices and tools (Flux, Helm, Kustomize)
- Experience designing and versioning Kubernetes CRDs and API lifecycle management
- Strong testing practices for operators, including unit and integration tests
- Experience with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows
- Ability to mentor engineers and collaborate across application and infrastructure teams
- Live-production incident response experience
- Telemetry-driven debugging, distributed tracing, and metrics-driven root-cause analysis
- Proven API lifecycle maintenance including upgrade strategies and n-1 compatibility testing
Clarity Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Clarity and has not been reviewed or approved by Clarity.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered strong, with multiple references to “good” or “excellent” compensation. Salary snapshots for engineering and platform roles depict robust pay across multiple seniority levels.
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Healthcare Strength — Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage alongside mental‑health support and wellness programs. The breadth of core offerings indicates comprehensive health support for individuals and families.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time‑off provisions cover company holidays, PTO, and defined leaves such as parental, bereavement, and jury duty. This range of leave types supports common personal and family needs.
Clarity Insights
What We Do
Clarity Innovations designs, develops, and deploys force-enhancing software that links human ingenuity to powerful computing and makes our country and our world a better, safer place. Our principles of servant leadership, mutual respect, and technological excellence enable us to thrive on the challenges of the digital frontline. Clarity is focused on helping the Government redefine its relationship with technology by encouraging the use of DevSecOps and Agile methodologies, small-teams constructs, and process automation. To create an atmosphere that embraces the challenges inherent in progress, we honor creativity and curiosity, supporting exploration and growth with modern tech stacks and methodologies. We are as much a family as we are a team, collectively engineering technology that improves the lives and work of the people who use it. We empower our people with the tools, training, and vision they need to outperform the competition.
