Senior Platform Engineer.
You've operated Kubernetes in production, written Terraform you're not embarrassed by, and held a pager. You're looking for a small team that ships, a public toolkit you can leave your name on, and senior peers who've done the work.
About the role
You'll be the fifth platform engineer on a team of nine. We split our time across two anchor clients (one Series C fintech, one federal-cloud program) and the open-source toolkit, the runners, status pages, and SOC monitor we maintain on GitHub. Your week will be roughly 60% client engineering, 30% toolkit work, and 10% writing or reviewing.
This is not a meeting-heavy role. You'll spend most of your time in your editor, in PRs, and in 1 to 2 short syncs per day with the embedded client team. We expect you to be on-call about one week in five.
What you'll do
- Design and operate Kubernetes platforms for our clients, node pools, autoscaling, networking, identity, the boring foundation.
- Write the Terraform other people will read three years from now. Modules, state, drift detection, rollback paths.
- Improve the open-source toolkit. Contribute features, review PRs from outside contributors, write the changelog like you mean it.
- Pair with client engineers on the harder problems, incident response, capacity planning, the occasional 2am page.
- Write internal RFCs and the occasional blog post. We expect you to publish at least one piece of writing a year.
Who you are
- 5+ years operating production systems on Kubernetes (any flavor, EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem).
- Comfortable in Terraform and at least one of: Pulumi, OpenTofu, CDK. You've done a non-trivial state migration.
- Proficient in Go or Python, enough to read and contribute to operators and CI tooling, not just call APIs.
- You've held a pager for a system you owned. You can describe a postmortem you wrote and what changed because of it.
- US-based, eligible to work without sponsorship.
Bonus, not required
- OSS contributions to projects in the cloud-native ecosystem (Argo, Cilium, Tekton, OPA, anything in the CNCF graveyard).
- Experience with regulated workloads, FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI.
- You've written about your work publicly, talks, posts, podcast appearances.
- You've operated a system at scale that surprised you. We want to hear that story.
Interview process
- Application, resume + GitHub + paragraph. ~10 minutes for you, 30 for us.
- Engineering chat, 60 min, paired on a production trace. No whiteboard.
- Take-home, paid, ~6 hours, on our public toolkit. You submit a PR.
- Team day, 4 hours: design review, security walk-through, peer Q&A.
- Offer, within 48 hours of team day.
We pay for step 3 at $150/hr. If you turn down the offer, you keep the work and the payment.
Compensation & benefits
Salary band $185,000 to $230,000, plus 0.05 to 0.15% equity. We share comp ranges in the job ad because making you guess is an asshole move.
- Platinum medical, dental, vision · 100% premium covered for you
- 5 weeks PTO, 13 federal holidays, end-of-year shutdown
- $2,500 home-office sign-on, $750/yr maintenance
- $3,000/yr learning budget
- 10% open-source time