Senior Platform Engineer job description

Platform and DevOps — Senior Platform Engineer
Owns reliability and delivery for a platform area end to end.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design rollouts under constraints such as stateful data, schema migrations or multi-service changes so a bad version reaches few users, and recover a half-upgraded service.
- Design multi-cluster or multi-region topology, and lead the response when the orchestration layer itself is the thing failing.
- Write traffic policy for a service on your own, including routing rules, retries, circuit breaking and mutual TLS across namespaces.
- Lead the response to a severe, multi-team incident under real pressure, and keep the communication honest when the news is bad.
- Run failure experiments against production with real safeguards, and turn a surprising result into a concrete reliability fix.
- Trace an intermittent or load-dependent fault to its cause by reproducing it under controlled conditions.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Platform Engineer level (level 2 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

REQUIRED SKILLS
Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Landing Zone Design — You can extend the landing zone with a new network segment or account type, and you judge a requested exception to the guardrails on its risk rather than on precedent.
- Infrastructure Provisioning Automation — You can sequence a multi-environment change to avoid an outage, and set the coding and testing standards your team's infrastructure code meets.
- Network and Cloud Security Configuration — You can design the network segmentation and access boundaries for a new service, and tighten an existing configuration you find is over-permissive.
- 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 write and test a disaster recovery plan for a service, including its recovery time and recovery point objectives, and run the drill yourself.
- 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 rebuild delivery for a repository with slow, flaky or tangled builds, and set the pipeline conventions your team works to.
- Release Automation and Deployment Strategy — You can design rollouts under constraints such as stateful data, schema migrations or multi-service changes so a bad version reaches few users, and recover a half-upgraded service.
- Artifact and Package Registry Management — You can run a registry for a set of services unaided: version policy, promotion between repositories, scanning gates and retention rules that stop storage growing without limit.
- 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 design multi-cluster or multi-region topology, and lead the response when the orchestration layer itself is the thing failing.
- 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 write traffic policy for a service on your own, including routing rules, retries, circuit breaking and mutual TLS across namespaces. You debug a request the mesh dropped from the proxy logs and metrics rather than guessing.

SRE and Reliability
- On-Call Incident Command — You can lead the response to a severe, multi-team incident under real pressure, and keep the communication honest when the news is bad.
- Service Level Objective Management — You can set SLOs for a service with its stakeholders, and use a burning error budget to justify slowing down feature work.
- Alert Design and Noise Reduction — You can audit an alerting setup across several services, cut its noise significantly, and get the team to trust paging again.
- 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 run failure experiments against production with real safeguards, and turn a surprising result into a concrete reliability fix.
- Systems Troubleshooting — You can trace an intermittent or load-dependent fault to its cause by reproducing it under controlled conditions.

Cost and DevEx
- Cloud Cost Management — You can attribute spend to teams and features, and forecast demand from usage trends to cut cost without weakening reliability.
- Platform Self-Service Tooling — You can ship a golden path for a common task from provisioning to first deploy, and measure the toil it removes to decide what to automate 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 coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can advise the team on your area and apply new developments in the field where they pay off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead one piece of work shared by several people, on your own team and beyond, and make calls that they act on.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (required from Platform Engineer)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) (required from Senior Platform Engineer)