Linux Platform Engineer

Have you ever had that green-light feeling? When you hit every green light and the day just feels like magic. CLEAR's mission is to create frictionless experiences where every day has that feeling. With more than 30+ million passionate members and hundreds of partners around the world, CLEAR’s identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or right on your phone, CLEAR connects you to the things that make you, you - unlocking easier, more secure, and more seamless experiences - making them all feel like magic. 

As CLEAR continues to expand its identity platform across physical and digital environments, our network of kiosks and connected devices forms the backbone of our member experience. Ensuring these systems stay secure, reliable, and always available is mission-critical, and that’s where you come in.

We’re looking for a Platform Engineer to join our Hardware Operations and Platform Engineering team. You’ll be sitting at the intersection of Site Reliability Engineer and Embedded Systems Integration. You’ll be architecting and maintaining the software layer that keeps thousands of Linux-based kiosks online, healthy, and self-healing, effectively operating a distributed server fleet at the edge.

You’ll own everything from OS image management to over-the-air (OTA) updates, device observability, and system recovery, while ensuring our biometric kiosks deliver a consistent, frictionless experience to every traveler, every time.

What You Will Do

• Architect and implement OS-level watchdogs, process monitors, and self-healing mechanisms to ensure devices automatically recover from failures (service restarts, reboots, or rollbacks).
• Manage and enhance our OTA update framework to enable safe, atomic updates via A/B partition swapping and automated rollback when needed.
• Develop and maintain Python-based services that interact with connected peripherals (payment terminals, scanners, sensors) via vendor SDKs and serial interfaces.
• Own and maintain our custom Linux image (via Yocto, Buildroot, bootc, rpm-ostree, etc), managing systemd units, udev rules, and security policies for a locked-down, production-grade environment.
• Build lightweight monitoring agents to stream logs, metrics, and telemetry (connectivity, performance, temperature) to centralized observability systems such as Datadog or Splunk.
• Work closely with software, SRE, and field operations teams to identify pain points and develop scalable solutions that improve reliability and ease of maintenance.

Who You Are

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering embedded Linux systems
• Strong proficiency in Python for system automation, service orchestration, and hardware communication.
• Familiarity with A/B update mechanisms (RAUC, Mender, SWUpdate, or custom partition-switching logic).
• Experienced in serial communications (UART, RS-232, USB-serial) and SDK-based hardware integration.
• Deep knowledge of service dependencies, timers, and watchdog configuration.
• Familiarity with network observability and remote device management at fleet scale.
• Committed to operational excellence, focused on designing for resilience, testability, and safe rollback.
• Collaborative, pragmatic, and curious; equally comfortable debugging a kiosk in the field or improving CI/CD for edge devices.

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Massive impact: Your work ensures millions of travelers experience CLEAR’s identity platform without disruption.
• Unique technical challenge: Operate and scale a distributed edge infrastructure at the intersection of IoT and reliability engineering.
• End-to-end ownership: From OS image to telemetry pipeline, you’ll own the full stack of machine reliability.
• Collaborative culture: Deep cross-functional partnership with engineering and operations experts to create frictionless identity experiences.
• Continuous learning: Work on modern Linux, OTA updates, and observability systems at enterprise scale.
  
  

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 $150,000-185,000 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, Restricted Stock Units.

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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