Senior Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering

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About the Role:

We are seeking an experienced and driven Senior Staff Platform Engineer to join our dynamic Platform Engineering team. This role will be pivotal in building and enhancing our platform around Kubernetes (K8s), improving our AWS implementation, designing and provisioning cloud infrastructure via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and developing a robust disaster recovery plan in AWS. The Senior Staff Platform Engineer will also play a critical role in strategizing future platform engineering efforts, working closely with the Director of Platform Engineering, the Vice President of Software Engineering and the Platform Engineering team in place.

What You'll Do:

• Platform Development: Design, build, and enhance our platform around K8s/EKS, ensuring high availability, scalability, security and performance.
• AWS Implementation: Lead efforts to improve our AWS implementation, focusing on the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework - Operational Excellence, Cost Optimization, Sustainability, Performance Efficiency etc.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Design and provision cloud infrastructure using IaC tools like Terraform and Crossplane, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and rapid deployment capabilities.
• Disaster Recovery: Develop and implement a comprehensive AWS disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity and data protection.
• Observability: Implement and maintain observability solutions to monitor system performance, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot issues using tools like DataDog.
• Cloud FinOps: Manage cloud financial operations to optimize cloud spending, ensure cost efficiency, and provide financial transparency.
• Collaboration: Work closely with customer engineering teams to further the platform and improve overall user experience.
• Product Management: Occasionally put on a PM hat to align platform engineering efforts with business goals and customer engineering needs.
• Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
• Best Practices: Define and enforce best practices for managing our infrastructure, focusing on automation, monitoring, and incident response.
• Future Strategy: Participate in strategic planning for future platform engineering efforts, identifying new technologies and methodologies to enhance our platform capabilities that align with business needs.

What You'll Bring:

• Experience: 8+ years of experience in Cloud Native Engineering (DevOps | SRE | Platform Engineering) with a strong focus on AWS, Kubernetes, automation and architecture/design. Proven track record of building and maintaining large scale, highly available systems.
• Technical Skills: Extensive expertise in Kubernetes, IaC, and AWS services such as EKS, S3, SQS, RDS/Aurora, EC2, Lambda, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and VPC. Demonstrated experience in building CI/CD pipelines using GitLab or GitHub and in building health metric dashboards and alerts in monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and DataDog. Proven track record in disaster recovery planning within AWS for large-scale enterprises or in high traffic volume organizations. Strong proficiency in advanced scripting languages like Python or object-oriented programming languages such as Java. Experience with CDNs such as Fastly, Cloudflare and Amazon Cloudfront a plus.
• Observability Tools: Proficiency in observability tools like DataDog for monitoring and performance analysis.
• Cloud FinOps: Experience with Cloud FinOps to manage and optimize cloud costs effectively.
• Collaboration: Excellent communication skills with the ability to work effectively across teams and with stakeholders at all levels, including customer engineering teams.
• Product Management: Ability to take on product management responsibilities, as needed, to create epics and stories with proper acceptance criteria and requirements.
• Leadership: Demonstrated abili