Hardware Infrastructure Engineer II

CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 43 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences.

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 motivated by our mission of making experiences safer and easier. Our offices are bright and energetic with an open concept and plenty of conference rooms and casual co-working spaces. We also offer catered lunches every day and have fully stocked kitchens. Outside of the office, we invest in your well-being and learning & development with stipends and reimbursement programs.

We offer holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans, family-building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support), flexible time off, annual wellness stipend, free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents, a CLEAR Plus membership, and a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match. The base compensation range for this role is $163,500 – $190,500 , depending on levels of skills and experience.

This total compensation will include base salary and new hire equity package (in Restricted Stock Units) for this position at CLEAR. Additionally, this role will be eligible for refresh equity grants as part of our ongoing compensation program. Actual compensation will vary based on factors including, but not limited to, location, education, skills, experience, and performance. All stock based compensation will be subject to the terms and conditions of applicable agreements.

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.

We are committed to a transparent and secure hiring process. All communications related to this role will come directly from a CLEAR employee through valid CLEAR channels (e.g., a valid @clearme.com email address or verified CLEAR LinkedIn profile). We encourage candidates to remain alert to job scams and to report any suspicious activity.

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