Software Engineer, Federal Infrastructure

Persona

About The Position

The federal government loses billions of dollars each year to fraud. As generative AI makes attacks cheaper and harder to catch, agencies need identity infrastructure that's secure by design, not bolted on after the fact. Persona is building the identity layer for the public sector. FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure that lets government agencies verify citizens, prevent fraud, and modernize legacy systems without compromising on security or compliance. This isn't a role where you maintain someone else's compliance checklist. You'll be a founding builder of Persona's federal infrastructure, owning the full stack from cloud architecture to deployment pipelines to continuous compliance.

Requirements

3+ years of software engineering or infrastructure engineering experience, with a track record of designing and shipping systems in regulated environments (federal, healthcare, financial services, etc.).
Infrastructure-as-code fluency. Hands-on experience with GCP, AWS, or Azure and tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
Strong software engineering fundamentals. Proficiency in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, with the ability to work across the application stack.
Container and orchestration experience. Docker and Kubernetes in production, plus CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) and secure SDLC practices (SAST, DAST, vulnerability scanning).
Clear communicator across disciplines. You can translate compliance requirements into architecture decisions and work effectively across infrastructure, security, compliance, and product teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, GCP Cloud Logging, etc.)
Contributions to open-source infrastructure or security projects
Experience with federal procurement or working directly with government customers
Background in SRE practices or prior FedRAMP authorization experience
Active security clearance (e.g., Secret/Top Secret)

Responsibilities

Make federal-grade infrastructure the default, not the exception. Design, build, and operate secure cloud infrastructure in GCP that meets FedRAMP Moderate and High requirements, enabling Persona to serve government customers with the same speed and reliability our commercial customers already expect.
Turn compliance from a bottleneck into a shipping advantage. Build automated deployment pipelines, security controls, and compliance gates so that meeting federal standards accelerates delivery rather than slowing it down.
Make continuous compliance real, not theoretical. Develop tooling for automated vulnerability scanning, remediation workflows, and evidence collection, replacing manual overhead with systems that prove our security posture in real time.
Give every engineer the tools to build compliantly. Create internal platforms and automation that make it easy for product teams to deploy into federal environments without becoming compliance experts themselves.
Bridge the gap between policy and production. Partner with security and compliance teams to translate federal requirements into working systems, and serve as the engineering voice in audits, reviews, and incident response.