Staff Platform Engineer

Job summary

Sets technical direction for a platform while remaining hands-on with infrastructure code and production systems, resolving complex infrastructure challenges across engineering teams. Leads architecture changes and large migrations, establishes organization-wide infrastructure and delivery standards, and owns security, cost, capacity, observability, and reliability strategy. The platform runs on GCP services including GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and BigQuery, with systems supporting live auctions.

Qualifications

• At least 7 years of professional engineering experience, with demonstrated infrastructure or platform impact across teams.
• Expert-level TypeScript proficiency and strong proficiency in Go or Python.
• GCP architecture expertise across GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and BigQuery.
• Deep expertise operating MySQL, PostgreSQL, and distributed SQL, including replication, connection pooling, schema evolution, and zero-downtime migrations.
• Expert knowledge of distributed systems, including consensus, replication, concurrency control, exactly-once semantics, and fault-tolerant design.
• Expertise in network architecture, including multi-project VPC design, private service connectivity, load balancing, mTLS, and traffic management.
• Knowledge of alerting, SLOs and SLAs, distributed tracing, IAM, secrets management, network security, and abusive-traffic defense.
• Ability to set technical direction autonomously, shape architecture across teams, and guide strategic decisions.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Audit platform architecture and lead major cross-team architectural changes.
• Write technical proposals and build agreement with product and engineering stakeholders.
• Set organization-wide standards for infrastructure patterns, delivery practices, tooling, and technology choices.
• Partner with Buyer and Cargo engineering leadership to align the platform with team needs.
• Define observability, reliability, and incident standards; resolve systemic bottlenecks, performance crises, and failures under heavy contention.
• Plan and execute database, network, and project migrations without disrupting live auctions.
• Own platform security, cost, and capacity strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction without formal authority.

Skills

Degrees

Languages

Industry

Relocation