Senior Platform & Automation Architect at Fervo Energy Company – Houston, Texas

Fervo is building the most cost-effective, repeatable geothermal power plants in the world. Scaling that mission requires disciplined, automation-first digital systems that enable engineering speed, reliability, and operational rigor. The Senior Platform & Automation Architect, within IT Infrastructure, defines the standards and builds the foundational automation that power how Fervo develops software, provisions infrastructure, and scales data and IoT systems.

The Senior Platform & Automation Architect owns Fervo’s platform engineering and automation roadmap. This role establishes reusable patterns and guardrails for SDLC, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, network automation, and data/IoT pipelines, including the integration and enablement of AI toolsets to accelerate development and operations.

Working across Data, AI, Controls, Exploration, R&D, and Infrastructure teams, this role reduces friction, increases delivery reliability, and ensures systems are secure, scalable, and auditable across corporate and plant environments. Success requires strong hands-on technical depth and sound architectural judgment.

Responsibilities

Platform & Developer Enablement

• Define and evolve SDLC standards, repository structures, branching models, and release governance
• Build reusable CI/CD templates with automated testing, promotion controls, and rollback capabilities
• Establish “golden path” reference architectures and self-service automation workflows
• Implement guardrails for secrets management, artifact versioning, and environment promotion
• Define and evolve standards and safe practices for enabling software developers and citizen developers to leverage AI coding tools through secure, self-service development workflows, ensuring ease of use while maintaining robust security and compliance controls.

Infrastructure & Network Automation

• Establish Infrastructure as Code standards, reusable modules, and policy-as-code controls
• Improve infrastructure provisioning speed and consistency through automation-first design
• Partner with cloud and network architects to implement validated automation patterns for configuration, rollout, and change control

Data & IoT Automation

• Define repeatable patterns for batch and streaming data pipelines with validation and observability
• Automate data scheduling, quality controls, and telemetry standardization
• Architect secure ingestion and monitoring workflows for plant and field sensor data

Governance & Operational Excellence

• Embed auditability and change tracking into CI/CD and infrastructure workflows
• Develop documentation, standards, and runbooks to support adoption at scale
• Lead design reviews and cross-functional technical enablement sessions
• Support critical releases and platform-level incident response as needed

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years of experience in software, platform, DevOps, or infrastructure automation roles, including senior ownership of engineering standards and cross-team enablement
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with AI-based workloads, applying strong software engineering practices and building agent-based systems using tools such as Claude, Cursor, Codex, or similar
• Proficiency in TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or Go, with demonstrated ability to ship secure, testable production code
• Strong Git and GitOps expertise, operating Git as the source of truth for declarative environment management
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, promotion controls, and reliable rollback
• Hands-on experience building and operating containerized services and Kubernetes platforms
• Ability to build modern web interfaces (React preferred) and integrate them with secure REST APIs using sound authentication and performance practices
• Experience designing secure REST APIs with proper versioning, idempotency, pagination, and rate limiting
• Experience building or operating batch and streaming data pipelines with validation, schema evolution, and backfill strategies
• Strong observability and production operations skills, including logs, metrics, traces, and runbook development

Preferred

• Experience supporting IT systems in OT-adjacent or plant environments
• Familiarity with SCADA systems, data historians, or industrial telemetry
• Experience implementing policy-as-code controls and audit-aligned SDLC practices
• Exposure to event-driven or microservices architectures
• Experience supporting AI/ML or agent-based workloads in production

Travel & On-Call

Travel

• Up to 20% travel may be required to support plant and remote site enablement, including on-site implementation, rollout support, operational readiness validation, and cross-functional coordination with field engineering and operations teams.

On-Call

• Participation in on-call rotations may be required to support critical platform releases, incident response, and scheduled maintenance windows. This includes providing timely technical leadership during high-impact events and ensuring platform stability across production environments.