Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Title: Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure Location: New York, NY, United States

As an Staff Software Engineer on Cloud Infrastructure, you'll set the technical direction for the cloud platform that underpins every system at CLEAR, from AWS networking and Kubernetes to staging environments and infrastructure for AI workloads. You'll design durable, cross-team patterns and standards that make it faster and safer for every engineer at CLEAR to build, ship, and operate reliable software.

What You'll Do:

• Drive the technical direction and long-term architecture of CLEAR's cloud platform across AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), networking, and Infrastructure as Code, balancing reliability, security, cost, and simplicity
• Lead cross-functional initiatives end to end, including production-like staging environments and infrastructure for AI workloads, from RFC and design through rollout and adoption
• Define and evolve infrastructure engineering standards (IaC patterns, safe rollout and rollback, observability, network and security baselines) that teams across engineering adopt
• Act as a product owner for the platform: gather feedback from engineering teams, find the systemic pain points, and build self-service capabilities that remove toil
• Raise the engineering bar by mentoring engineers, leading design and incident reviews, and turning lessons learned into lasting system improvements

How You'll Measure Success:

• Platform reliability: availability and SLO attainment of core infrastructure services, and fewer infrastructure-caused incidents
• Developer velocity: lead time for engineers or agents to provision environments and infrastructure, and adoption of staging and self-service tooling
• Operational efficiency: reduction in toil and manual operations, and improved cloud cost efficiency
• Standards adoption: share of services and infrastructure aligned with Cloud Infrastructure standards and patterns

What You're Great At:

• Cloud architecture at scale: deep AWS expertise (VPC design, routing, Security Groups, load balancing, Route53, IAM) and designing multi-account, multi-environment platforms; experience with edge and network security tooling (e.g., Cloudflare, Palo Alto) is a plus
• Software engineering: designing and building production software systems such as services, APIs, and internal developer tools in Python, Java or similar, with strong fundamentals in system design, testing, and maintainable code. You build systems, not just configure them.
• Kubernetes and container platforms: running and evolving production EKS clusters, including cluster networking, ingress, service mesh (e.g., Istio), and cluster lifecycle management
• Infrastructure as Code and software engineering: writing production-grade software in Python or another modern language, and building reusable, well-tested Pulumi (or Terraform/CloudFormation) modules
• Reliability and observability: designing for failure, safe rollouts, leading incident response, and instrumenting systems with tools like Datadog
• Technical leadership beyond your team: driving consensus across teams through RFCs and design reviews, communicating clear trade-offs, and mentoring other engineers

How You’ll be Rewarded:

At CLEAR we help YOU move forward - because when you're at your best, we're at our best. You'll work with talented team members who are motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier.

In our offices, you'll enjoy benefits like meals and snacks. We invest in your well-being and learning & development with our stipend and reimbursement programs.

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match. The base salary range for this role is $215,000 - $260,000, depending on levels of skills and experience.

The base salary range represents the low and high end of CLEAR's salary range for this position. Salaries will vary depending on various factors which include, but are not limited to location, education, skills, experience and performance. The range listed is just one component of CLEAR's total compensation package for employees and other rewards may include annual bonuses, commission, and Restricted Stock Units.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.

CLEAR provides reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities or protected needs. Please let us know if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include, but are not limited to, time off, extra breaks, making a change to the application process or work procedures, policy exceptions, providing documents in an alternative format, live captioning or using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

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