Platform Engineer job description

Platform and DevOps — Platform Engineer
Operates infrastructure and CI/CD independently day to day.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Provision a new project or account from the standard landing zone template, applying the required guardrails and tagging without help.
- Design a reusable module with isolated state and automated tests on every change, and refactor a production module without recreating resources.
- Configure a security group or firewall rule for a routine request, following the least-privilege pattern the team already uses.
- Design the rotation schedule and blast-radius for a class of secrets, and lead the response when a credential is suspected to have leaked.
- Verify that backups for a service are actually completing and restorable, not just scheduled, and escalate when they are not.
- Run a patch cycle across a fleet with minimal disruption, and negotiate an exception for a system that genuinely cannot be patched on schedule.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Junior Platform Engineer level (level 1 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

REQUIRED SKILLS
Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Landing Zone Design — You can provision a new project or account from the standard landing zone template, applying the required guardrails and tagging without help.
- Infrastructure Provisioning Automation — You can design a reusable module with isolated state and automated tests on every change, and refactor a production module without recreating resources.
- Network and Cloud Security Configuration — You can configure a security group or firewall rule for a routine request, following the least-privilege pattern the team already uses.
- Secrets and Credential Rotation — You can design the rotation schedule and blast-radius for a class of secrets, and lead the response when a credential is suspected to have leaked.
- Disaster Recovery and Backup Planning — You can verify that backups for a service are actually completing and restorable, not just scheduled, and escalate when they are not.
- Infrastructure Vulnerability and Patch Management — You can run a patch cycle across a fleet with minimal disruption, and negotiate an exception for a system that genuinely cannot be patched on schedule.

CI/CD and Delivery
- CI Pipeline Engineering — You can design the build, test and packaging stages for a new service on your own, including caching and parallelism, and keep run times honest. You fix the pipeline when it breaks rather than routing around it.
- Release Automation and Deployment Strategy — You can automate a rolling deployment to the pattern your team already uses, including health checks and an automatic rollback trigger. You test the rollback rather than assuming it works.
- Artifact and Package Registry Management — You can set up publishing and versioning for a new component to the scheme your team follows, and act on the vulnerability findings a scanner raises against images you own.
- Environment and Configuration Management — You can keep a set of environments reproducible from their definitions, and classify each configuration change by risk before promoting it to production.

Container Platform
- Container Orchestration — You can write a manifest for a new workload, set sensible resource requests and limits, and debug a crash loop from the events and logs.
- Container Image Build and Hardening — You can build minimal, reproducible images for a new service unaided, choosing the base, trimming layers and keeping the build cache useful. You decide what belongs in the image and what belongs at runtime.
- Service Mesh Operations — You can read the mesh configuration for a service and explain what traffic it allows. You apply a policy someone else has written and confirm the sidecar picked it up, with a reviewer checking your change.

SRE and Reliability
- On-Call Incident Command — You can triage an incident, communicate status at a steady cadence, and mitigate a known failure mode without waiting for direction.
- Service Level Objective Management — You can propose an SLO for a simple service from its actual user impact, and track the error budget it consumes week to week.
- Alert Design and Noise Reduction — You can design a new alert around user-facing symptoms rather than internal signals, and remove an alert that nobody has acted on in months.
- Postmortem and Incident Learning — You can facilitate a postmortem for a complex incident, keep it blameless when tempers are short, and push back on an action item that will not actually prevent recurrence.
- Chaos Engineering and Failure Testing — You can take part in a planned failure test on a system, following the test plan someone else wrote.
- Systems Troubleshooting — You can find the failing layer in a routine fault, such as a full disk or a blocked port, from its logs and metrics.

Cost and DevEx
- Cloud Cost Management — You can tag resources so spend lands with the owning team, and resize instances you own to match measured usage rather than a guess.
- Platform Self-Service Tooling — You can build a template or small command that automates a repetitive operations task, with failure messages that say what to do next.
- Developer Platform Documentation and Enablement — You can own the documentation for a part of the platform, from onboarding through reference to troubleshooting, and keep it current as the platform ships. You answer the repeat questions in the docs instead of in the support channel.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can organize a small piece of work into steps, put them in a sensible order, and finish it by the date you agreed, raising problems before they cause a delay.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate your own work with reasonable accuracy and keep a steady enough pace that other people can plan around you.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can pick up a problem that has no obvious owner and make yourself accountable for it, including the parts nobody enjoys.
- Quality Focus — You can define what good enough means for a project, put checks in place to show it has been met, and hold work back when it falls short.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can break a large, ambiguous problem into pieces and weigh the options for each against the evidence.
- Domain Expertise — You can work confidently with the tools and methods your team uses daily, and you can explain how your work serves the team's goals.
- Continuous Learning — You can pick up an unfamiliar area fast enough to be useful in it, and you turn what you learned into something others can reuse.

Communication
- Communication — You can explain a complex topic to people with very different backgrounds, adjusting the detail to the audience without talking down to them.
- Collaboration — You can build working relationships beyond your own team and get things done through people who do not report to you.
- Writing & Documentation — You can write for a defined audience, whether a proposal, a policy, a report, or a decision record, and make the reasoning as clear as the conclusion.
- Stakeholder Management — You can identify who is affected by your work and keep them updated at a level of detail and a frequency that suits them.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can spot a problem and propose a way forward unprompted, and you take a small leading role such as running a working group.
- Mentoring — You can help someone new settle into your team's work, answer their questions patiently, and give feedback specific enough to act on.
- Strategic Thinking — You can connect your team's work to its goals and question a task that does not appear to serve them.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (required from Platform Engineer)