Senior/Staff Platform Engineer

The Senior/Staff Platform Engineer will build, operate, and evolve large-scale production infrastructure with a strong focus on Kubernetes and reliability.
This hands-on role spans cloud infrastructure, Linux, networking, observability, CI/CD, automation, and production operations.
You will diagnose complex infrastructure challenges across multiple technical layers and build tooling that improves reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
The position offers significant autonomy, with ownership of ambiguous initiatives from initial design through implementation and production operation.
You will work directly with technical stakeholders, contribute to architecture and reliability decisions, and take a leading role in critical incident resolution.
Your impact will extend beyond day-to-day operations as you establish stronger engineering practices, automation, observability, and operational resilience.
This is an ideal opportunity for a highly experienced engineer who combines deep systems expertise with strong technical judgment and communication skills.

• 10+ years of professional experience in Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps, or related fields is preferred for Staff-level candidates, with significant hands-on experience operating complex production infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating production Kubernetes platforms is required, rather than experience limited to deploying applications onto existing clusters.
• Production programming experience in Go, Python, or Java is required, with the ability to read, debug, maintain, and contribute to production codebases and automation.
• Strong experience with production reliability, incident response, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and operational ownership is essential.
• Demonstrated ability to independently own complex technical initiatives from ambiguous starting points through design, implementation, and production operation.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is preferred, although equivalent practical experience may be considered.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes infrastructure, including cluster architecture, networking and CNI, NetworkPolicy, scheduling, resource management, nodes, security, RBAC, and cluster behavior.
• Strong Linux fundamentals and hands-on experience troubleshooting production systems, combined with a solid understanding of DNS, routing, load balancing, connectivity, and cloud/Kubernetes networking.
• Production experience with at least one major cloud platform, such as AWS, GCP, or Alicloud, along with infrastructure-as-code experience using Terraform or equivalent tooling.
• Experience with configuration management and automation technologies such as Ansible, Puppet, or similar platforms.
• Strong observability expertise using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience with CI/CD infrastructure, Docker, container tooling, modern software delivery practices, high availability, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and production resilience.
• Experience planning and executing production cloud or infrastructure migrations, operating large-scale or multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, or working with hybrid, on-premises, virtualized, or bare-metal infrastructure is preferred.
• Additional experience with Kubernetes controllers or operators, advanced networking, service mesh, mTLS, workload identity, multi-cloud infrastructure, security hardening, IAM, compliance, capacity planning, performance engineering, or developer platform tooling is highly valued.
• Previous technical leadership, mentoring, Staff/Principal-level responsibilities, or experience working directly with external customers in consulting or service-delivery environments is preferred.
• Exceptional written and verbal technical communication skills are required, with the ability to explain architecture, risks, trade-offs, and technical decisions clearly to customers, engineers, and technical leadership.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, high ownership, sound technical judgment, and the ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments are essential.
• The ideal candidate can influence others without formal management authority and is comfortable taking the lead on complex technical problems without continuous oversight.
• This is a hands-on platform and reliability engineering position. Candidates should have personally built, operated, troubleshot, and improved production infrastructure rather than primarily consuming managed services or deploying applications onto Kubernetes.
• The role requires availability during core hours aligned with Pacific Time, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM PST, as well as participation in an on-call rotation approximately every four to five weeks.