Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

What you'll do

• Architect and evolve the EKS platform strategy for cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared components.
• Lead technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown using Terraform and Spacelift.
• Own the reliability of core shared components like Karpenter and CoreDNS across the fleet.
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards for resource configuration, isolation, and disruption tolerance.
• Build automation paths to move platform standards from research to policy-enforced defaults.
• Establish observability, baseline audits, and reporting to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation.
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection.
• Participate in on-call rotations to triage and catalogue runtime Kubernetes issues.

What we're looking for

• 10+ years of experience in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions.
• 6+ years of hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS.
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python with a track record of building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling.
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS, including EC2, VPC, IAM, and EKS.
• Deep expertise in EKS and Kubernetes internals, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling.
• Fluency in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and experience with GitOps-style deployment pipelines.
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper) and automated frameworks.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration skills.