Platform Engineering Lead Jobs for OPT Students
Platform Engineering Lead jobs are well-suited for F-1 OPT students with backgrounds in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or DevOps. Most roles qualify as specialty occupations under STEM OPT extension criteria, giving you up to 36 months of work authorization while pursuing H-1B sponsorship.
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Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the "art and science of building," providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.
The Role We Want You For
We're building a Platform Engineering function inside our Infrastructure Services organization with architectural and technical leadership at its core. The mission is clear: design, build, and lead the evolution of a platform that makes it easy to build and operate reliable infrastructure and delivery workflows - first for our cloud and network engineering teams, and then for partners across application integrations, data engineering, and technologist business teams. We're looking for a technically exceptional engineer who has built platform toolchains and infrastructure automation from the ground up. Someone ready to take technical ownership: architecting solutions, executing on technical direction, and leading the implementation of how infrastructure gets built and shipped across the organization. This isn't a role where you're handed a mature platform and asked to maintain it. This is a role where you architect and build the foundation from scratch - designing the systems, modules, and automated workflows that become the organizational standard. You'll drive the technical implementation, establish patterns, and help shape how platform engineering evolves here. And importantly: we're AI-forward by design. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone who is genuinely excited to apply AI to infrastructure automation, delivery workflows, and operational excellence not as a buzzword, but as a multiplier.
The Specifics of the Role
You'll architect and lead the technical implementation of reusable building blocks and infrastructure automation that make delivery consistent, safe, and fast across the organization. Working with leadership on direction, you'll own the execution and drive adoption:
CI/CD golden paths
- Lead the design and implementation of GitHub-based CI/CD standards: architect a comprehensive library of pipelines that cover infrastructure use cases (Terraform workflows, promotion patterns, validations, approvals, environment strategies), working with leadership to establish patterns that become organizational canon.
- Establish and drive adoption of pipeline design principles and best practices so teams follow proven patterns rather than inventing delivery every sprint; lead the evolution as requirements change.
- Design guardrails that are both powerful and usable (linting, validation, policy checks, secret handling) - working with leadership to decide what gets enforced, where, and why.
Terraform modules that encode best practices
- Architect and build a Terraform module library that encodes organizational best practices designing module interfaces, setting composition patterns, and ensuring consistency across infrastructure definitions.
- Architect best-practice-by-default patterns in collaboration with leadership - covering security posture, naming conventions, tagging strategy, observability-ready architecture, and forward-thinking cloud capabilities.
- Partner with cloud and network engineers as a technical leader: ensure modules are practical, scalable, and usable, while driving adoption and setting expectations for how platform capabilities scale across teams.
- Build Disaster Recovery into the building blocks, not bespoke solutions by service.
AI-first workflows for infrastructure and operations
- Lead the technical implementation of AI-enabled workflows working with leadership on strategy: evaluate and integrate Enterprise AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, and emerging agent frameworks) into infrastructure and operational processes, always looking for opportunities to accelerate delivery and eliminate toil.
- Drive thoughtful technical decision-making across the platform by integrating AI-assisted analysis and automation - turning data and insights into better infrastructure decisions.
- Lead the evolution of incident response and operational workflows - using AI and automation to make incident response faster, smarter, and more consistent.
- Pioneer the next evolution of AI-powered infrastructure working with leadership: explore and architect agent-based systems (workflow engines like n8n, agentic AI patterns) for PR generation, intelligent incident handling, and autonomous runbook execution - driving both the technical implementation and organizational readiness for this shift.
Requirements
- Terraform/Terraform Cloud expertise: you have built and shipped real Terraform work at scale, with deep understanding of module architecture, state management patterns, and workflow design - and experience guiding others on these topics.
- Git/GitHub mastery: deep expertise in workflows, branching strategies, code review processes, and CI/CD integration - with experience designing these patterns for teams and platforms.
- Cloud architecture expertise in Azure or AWS (Azure strongly preferred; AWS experience a plus) - including hands-on infrastructure design, service selection, and multi-cloud strategy thinking.
- Software engineering discipline: you write clean, maintainable code and design systems with other engineers in mind - building abstractions, APIs, and tooling that are a pleasure to use (language-flexible; what matters is design sensibility and execution quality).
- AI-forward technical leadership: you actively use AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) as daily multipliers, you have a proven track record of operationalizing AI into engineering workflows, and you see agentic AI patterns as foundational to the next generation of infrastructure automation. You can articulate where AI adds leverage and where it doesn't.
- Datadog (observability patterns, dashboards/monitors as code, integrating telemetry into workflows)
- Ansible
- Networking fundamentals (enough to collaborate effectively with network engineering)
- Kubernetes / Docker (we have some Kubernetes in AWS today)
- Workflow automation platforms (for example: n8n) or interest in agent-style automation
Some Things You Should Know
- No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
- We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
- The pace is fast!
- This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.
Why Clayco?
- 2025 Best Places to Work – St. Louis Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Phoenix Business Journal.
- 2025 ENR Top 400 – Top Data Center Contractor (Top 3).
- 2025 ENR Top 100 Design-Build Firms – Design-Build Contractor (Top 5).
- 2025 ENR Top 100 Green Contractors – Green Contractor (Top 3).
Benefits
- Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance
- Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!
Compensation
- The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.
About us
Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the "art and science of building," providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.
The Role We Want You For
We're building a Platform Engineering function inside our Infrastructure Services organization with architectural and technical leadership at its core. The mission is clear: design, build, and lead the evolution of a platform that makes it easy to build and operate reliable infrastructure and delivery workflows - first for our cloud and network engineering teams, and then for partners across application integrations, data engineering, and technologist business teams. We're looking for a technically exceptional engineer who has built platform toolchains and infrastructure automation from the ground up. Someone ready to take technical ownership: architecting solutions, executing on technical direction, and leading the implementation of how infrastructure gets built and shipped across the organization. This isn't a role where you're handed a mature platform and asked to maintain it. This is a role where you architect and build the foundation from scratch - designing the systems, modules, and automated workflows that become the organizational standard. You'll drive the technical implementation, establish patterns, and help shape how platform engineering evolves here. And importantly: we're AI-forward by design. Senior leadership is all-in on AI, and we want someone who is genuinely excited to apply AI to infrastructure automation, delivery workflows, and operational excellence not as a buzzword, but as a multiplier.
The Specifics of the Role
You'll architect and lead the technical implementation of reusable building blocks and infrastructure automation that make delivery consistent, safe, and fast across the organization. Working with leadership on direction, you'll own the execution and drive adoption:
CI/CD golden paths
- Lead the design and implementation of GitHub-based CI/CD standards: architect a comprehensive library of pipelines that cover infrastructure use cases (Terraform workflows, promotion patterns, validations, approvals, environment strategies), working with leadership to establish patterns that become organizational canon.
- Establish and drive adoption of pipeline design principles and best practices so teams follow proven patterns rather than inventing delivery every sprint; lead the evolution as requirements change.
- Design guardrails that are both powerful and usable (linting, validation, policy checks, secret handling) - working with leadership to decide what gets enforced, where, and why.
Terraform modules that encode best practices
- Architect and build a Terraform module library that encodes organizational best practices designing module interfaces, setting composition patterns, and ensuring consistency across infrastructure definitions.
- Architect best-practice-by-default patterns in collaboration with leadership - covering security posture, naming conventions, tagging strategy, observability-ready architecture, and forward-thinking cloud capabilities.
- Partner with cloud and network engineers as a technical leader: ensure modules are practical, scalable, and usable, while driving adoption and setting expectations for how platform capabilities scale across teams.
- Build Disaster Recovery into the building blocks, not bespoke solutions by service.
AI-first workflows for infrastructure and operations
- Lead the technical implementation of AI-enabled workflows working with leadership on strategy: evaluate and integrate Enterprise AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Claude, and emerging agent frameworks) into infrastructure and operational processes, always looking for opportunities to accelerate delivery and eliminate toil.
- Drive thoughtful technical decision-making across the platform by integrating AI-assisted analysis and automation - turning data and insights into better infrastructure decisions.
- Lead the evolution of incident response and operational workflows - using AI and automation to make incident response faster, smarter, and more consistent.
- Pioneer the next evolution of AI-powered infrastructure working with leadership: explore and architect agent-based systems (workflow engines like n8n, agentic AI patterns) for PR generation, intelligent incident handling, and autonomous runbook execution - driving both the technical implementation and organizational readiness for this shift.
Requirements
- Terraform/Terraform Cloud expertise: you have built and shipped real Terraform work at scale, with deep understanding of module architecture, state management patterns, and workflow design - and experience guiding others on these topics.
- Git/GitHub mastery: deep expertise in workflows, branching strategies, code review processes, and CI/CD integration - with experience designing these patterns for teams and platforms.
- Cloud architecture expertise in Azure or AWS (Azure strongly preferred; AWS experience a plus) - including hands-on infrastructure design, service selection, and multi-cloud strategy thinking.
- Software engineering discipline: you write clean, maintainable code and design systems with other engineers in mind - building abstractions, APIs, and tooling that are a pleasure to use (language-flexible; what matters is design sensibility and execution quality).
- AI-forward technical leadership: you actively use AI tools (ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) as daily multipliers, you have a proven track record of operationalizing AI into engineering workflows, and you see agentic AI patterns as foundational to the next generation of infrastructure automation. You can articulate where AI adds leverage and where it doesn't.
- Datadog (observability patterns, dashboards/monitors as code, integrating telemetry into workflows)
- Ansible
- Networking fundamentals (enough to collaborate effectively with network engineering)
- Kubernetes / Docker (we have some Kubernetes in AWS today)
- Workflow automation platforms (for example: n8n) or interest in agent-style automation
Some Things You Should Know
- No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
- We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
- The pace is fast!
- This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.
Why Clayco?
- 2025 Best Places to Work – St. Louis Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Phoenix Business Journal.
- 2025 ENR Top 400 – Top Data Center Contractor (Top 3).
- 2025 ENR Top 100 Design-Build Firms – Design-Build Contractor (Top 5).
- 2025 ENR Top 100 Green Contractors – Green Contractor (Top 3).
Benefits
- Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance
- Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!
Compensation
- The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.
How to Get Visa Sponsorship in Platform Engineering Lead
Target companies with established H-1B sponsorship history
Focus on employers who have sponsored H-1B visas for platform or infrastructure roles before. Companies like large cloud-native startups and enterprise tech firms file LCAs regularly, signaling genuine sponsorship infrastructure rather than vague willingness.
Align your role to STEM OPT extension requirements
Platform Engineering Lead roles typically qualify for the 24-month STEM OPT extension if your degree is in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related STEM field. Confirm your CIP code with your DSO before accepting an offer.
Document your technical scope clearly on your resume
Employers assessing H-1B sponsorship need to verify specialty occupation status. A resume that quantifies infrastructure scale, cloud platforms managed, and team size makes it easier for their immigration counsel to build a strong petition.
Negotiate sponsorship terms before signing your offer
Clarify whether the employer covers H-1B filing fees, attorney costs, and premium processing. Platform engineering roles are competitive, giving you leverage to negotiate these terms during the offer stage rather than after you have started.
Use your OPT period to build cross-functional visibility
Platform Engineering Leads who demonstrate ownership of reliability, cost optimization, or developer experience programs are harder to lose. Internal advocacy from engineering directors strengthens the business case your employer presents for sponsorship.
Understand your OPT reporting obligations throughout employment
Report any changes in employer, role title, or work location to your DSO within ten days. For platform roles that involve remote or multi-site work, confirm your primary worksite is correctly recorded on your SEVIS record.
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Get Access To All JobsFrequently Asked Questions
Does a Platform Engineering Lead role qualify for the STEM OPT extension?
Yes, in most cases. Platform Engineering Lead positions typically require a degree in computer science, information systems, or electrical engineering, all of which appear on the DHS STEM designated degree program list. Confirm your specific CIP code with your designated school official before applying, since the extension approval depends on your degree field, not just your job title.
Do employers commonly sponsor H-1B visas for Platform Engineering Lead roles?
Yes. Platform Engineering Lead is a specialty occupation because the role requires at minimum a bachelor's degree in a specific technical field. Employers in cloud infrastructure, fintech, and enterprise SaaS regularly file H-1B petitions for this title. You can browse Platform Engineering Lead roles from verified sponsoring employers on Migrate Mate, which filters specifically for OPT-friendly and H-1B sponsoring companies.
Can I work as a Platform Engineering Lead on OPT if my degree is in a non-CS field like physics or mathematics?
Possibly. The STEM OPT extension requires your degree to appear on the DHS STEM list, and fields like applied mathematics, physics, and statistics are included. However, your employer must also be enrolled in E-Verify, and the role must be directly related to your degree. Discuss the connection between your specific degree and the platform engineering scope with your DSO to confirm eligibility.
What happens to my OPT authorization if I change employers during my Platform Engineering Lead job search?
Post-completion OPT is tied to your EAD card, not your employer, so you can change employers without filing new paperwork. You must report the change to your DSO within ten days and ensure the new role remains related to your degree. If you are on a STEM OPT extension, your new employer must be enrolled in E-Verify and you must file an updated Form I-983 training plan.
How should I address OPT work authorization with hiring managers early in the interview process?
Be straightforward and specific. State that you have OPT work authorization valid through your EAD expiration date, that you may qualify for a STEM extension, and that you are seeking an employer willing to file an H-1B petition. Platform engineering hiring managers generally appreciate direct framing over vague answers. Applying through Migrate Mate helps because employers listed there are already familiar with OPT sponsorship requirements.
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