Staff Platform Engineer
Phizenix· Information Technology And Services· Oct 14, 2026 · 14d ago
United States
Remote
Full-time
Staff
$167K–$235K est.
10+ years exp
Job description
This is a hands-on engineering position where leadership happens through the work. You will move fluidly between building production infrastructure, implementing multi-tenant isolation, hardening pipeline and policy enforcement, and instrumenting production. Your success is measured by what other engineers can consume without hand-holding: modules, pipelines, and patterns that hold up for the second and third consumer. What You'll Do
Platform Infrastructure Engineering
Build the platform's runtime: implement one container-orchestrated runtime, tenancy-grade isolation between client engagements, and the module contracts every product inherits.
Design composable infrastructure as code at fleet scale, with clear input contracts and state boundaries, published as versioned templates and images for every core component.
Make the environment lifecycle a one-command operation: created by merging a pull request, destroyed by deleting it, with automated proof nothing is left behind.
Design identity and network as a federated, credential-free system — one identity per engagement, just-in-time audited privileged access, separate internal and external edges.
Ship telemetry and cost visibility out of the box for every service: standard alerting, service-level objectives on live data, fault injection, and per-engagement cost attribution including AI spend.
Delivery Pipelines, Security & Compliance Engineering
Build and operate the shared delivery pipelines every product runs through, and the pluggable gate framework that quality, security, and AI-governance checks plug into with block-on-fail enforcement.
Implement security and compliance as code: release-blocking scanning on every repository, policy and admission control, signed and attested artifacts, and an audit trail and software bill of materials, including AI components, on every build as SOC2 / ISO 27001 evidence.
Package the AI-assisted development environment as a versioned, first-class deliverable, and enforce the sandbox boundary for coding agents: default-deny egress, short-lived credentials, isolated shared runners.
Run the platform as a product measured by developer outcomes — setup time, time to first commit, pipeline duration, gate false-positive rate, adoption — pruning or redesigning controls when governance burden outgrows benefit, and proving every golden path by shipping through it yourself.
Technical Leadership & Engineering Excellence
Make the platform's architecture decisions decidable — multi-tenancy, cloud posture, identity provider, network edge — by building the spikes and proofs of concept behind them, and produce the security and reliability evidence the program reports against.
Be the engineer other engineers come to on infrastructure, pipelines, and enforcement:review designs and pull requests, write architecture decision records for anything that closes off future options, and raise the bar for vendor partners through the work rather than formal management.
Drive adoption of platform standards across product teams, supporting migrations onto the platform where product teams execute and you unblock.
What You'll Need
Required
10+ years in software engineering, platform or infrastructure engineering, or a closely related technical field.
Hands-on expertise in infrastructure as code at fleet scale (Terraform or OpenTofu with Terragrunt or equivalent): module architecture, remote state, multi-environment topology.
Demonstrated experience operating multi-tenant Kubernetes platforms in production: GitOps, network and admission policy, workload identity, tenant isolation.
Experience building CI/CD as a shared platform (GitHub Actions or equivalent), with reusable workflow contracts, fleet-scale branch protection, and enforced quality and security gates.
Strong hands-on command of cloud identity and network security on Azure/AWS/GCP or a comparable hyperscaler: workload identity federation, RBAC, private networking, WAF, DNS.
Substantive experience with security and compliance as code: scanning toolchains (Snyk, Checkov, Trivy), policy engines (OPA, Kyverno, Azure Policy), supply chain controls (signing, provenance, SBOM), and SOC2 / ISO 27001 control evidence.
Production observability with OpenTelemetry or equivalent: collector topology, SLOs and error budgets, alert routing, incident management, fault injection.
Has built and operated production application software as a software engineer, in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript, and is fluent in testing strategy, code review, trunk-based delivery, and release management.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English; ability to translate complex technical topics to diverse audiences, including engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience with Agile methodologies and cross-functional product team collaboration.
Preferred / Additional Qualifications
Experience building platforms for consulting, advisory, or professional services, including client-isolation and data-residency requirements.
Familiarity with virtual-cluster and control-plane tooling (vcluster, Crossplane) and developer portals (Backstage, Port).
Experience operating a platform used by AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot or similar), including sandboxing of agent tooling.
Advanced certifications in cloud architecture, Kubernetes, or security (e.g., Azure Solutions Architect, CKA/CKS, CISSP).
FinOps experience: cost allocation, showback, and cloud cost optimization.
Demonstrated enthusiasm for developer education — writing internal guides, running workshops, or building internal tooling communities.
Application prep
Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.
Keywords to mirror
aikubernetesci/cdazureawsgcpgopythontypescriptagile
- Platform
- greenhouse
- Effort
- quick