Staff Platform Engineer job description

Platform and DevOps — Staff Platform Engineer
Sets platform direction across teams and leads incidents.

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Redesign part of the landing zone to fix a structural problem, such as a blast-radius or billing boundary, and roll the change out without breaking existing workloads.
- Lead a network or access redesign spanning several services, and fix a serious gap that a security review finds, including its root cause.
- Eliminate a category of long-lived secrets by moving it to short-lived or dynamically issued credentials, and get other teams to adopt the pattern.
- Coordinate a multi-service failover drill, find the dependency nobody had written down, and get it fixed before it causes a real outage.
- Drive remediation of a vulnerability that spans many teams' systems, and change the pipeline so the same class of gap does not recur.
- Design artifact management across many teams, including signing and provenance, so any deployed build traces back to the commit it came from.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Senior Platform Engineer level (level 3 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

REQUIRED SKILLS
Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Landing Zone Design — You can redesign part of the landing zone to fix a structural problem, such as a blast-radius or billing boundary, and roll the change out without breaking existing workloads.
- 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 lead a network or access redesign spanning several services, and fix a serious gap that a security review finds, including its root cause.
- Secrets and Credential Rotation — You can eliminate a category of long-lived secrets by moving it to short-lived or dynamically issued credentials, and get other teams to adopt the pattern.
- Disaster Recovery and Backup Planning — You can coordinate a multi-service failover drill, find the dependency nobody had written down, and get it fixed before it causes a real outage.
- Infrastructure Vulnerability and Patch Management — You can drive remediation of a vulnerability that spans many teams' systems, and change the pipeline so the same class of gap does not recur.

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 design artifact management across many teams, including signing and provenance, so any deployed build traces back to the commit it came from.
- Environment and Configuration Management — You can bring environments that have drifted apart back under source control without downtime, and set the approval path your team's changes follow for each risk class.

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 harden images for services with awkward runtime needs, and shrink the attack surface across a whole fleet without breaking builds.
- Service Mesh Operations — You can plan a mesh rollout or upgrade across many services without dropping traffic, settle what the mesh owns versus the application, and trace sidecar latency and failures.

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 across a portfolio of services, resolve a dispute between teams about what the objective should be, and retire an SLO that no longer reflects user experience.
- 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 spot the same contributing cause recurring across several postmortems, and get the underlying fix prioritized over the next incident.
- Chaos Engineering and Failure Testing — You can build the case for a failure-testing program across several services, and get sceptical teams to opt in.
- 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 take on spend that has no owner, such as data transfer and shared clusters, and size shared capacity for a launch or migration with no usage history.
- Platform Self-Service Tooling — You can make self-service safe for hard tasks such as production access or schema changes, keeping the guardrails without making the path unusable.
- Developer Platform Documentation and Enablement — You can plan enablement for a large platform change so teams migrate without queueing at your desk, and restructure documentation that has grown into a maze.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- 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 bring in good practice from outside the organization and make it work here, and your judgment clearly improves the work you touch.
- 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 hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

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