Staff Platform Engineer

Our client is a series B funded unicorn start-up that is looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to lead the design and evolution of their core infrastructure and developer experience. In this role, you'll operate as a technical authority and multiplier-establishing platform best practices, designing scalable systems, and driving adoption of modern infrastructure solutions across the engineering organization. This is a strategic and hands-on position for someone who thrives at the intersection of architecture, reliability, and developer productivity. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership and cross-functional teams to shape technical direction, streamline development workflows, and ensure their platform is a stable foundation for rapid product innovation.

What You'll Do

• Architect and evolve foundational platform systems with a focus on scalability, resiliency, and long-term maintainability
• Define and evangelize engineering standards for infrastructure, observability, and incident response across the organization
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across multiple teams to promote best practices in SRE and DevOps
• Drive the roadmap for internal tooling, CI/CD automation, and cloud infrastructure to improve engineering velocity and platform reliability
• Lead efforts to scale a secure, multi-region cloud environment and optimize for performance, cost-efficiency, and availability
• Collaborate with backend, security, and product teams to align platform capabilities with business goals
• Participate in high-severity incident management and root cause analysis, using findings to harden systems and improve processes

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years of experience in software, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with a strong background in distributed systems
• Proven ability to design and implement scalable infrastructure and developer tooling in complex environments
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and Kubernetes in production environments
• Deep understanding of cloud-native architectures; experience with Google Cloud Platform is preferred
• Strong grasp of observability, monitoring, and alerting strategies at scale
• Track record of driving initiatives that enhance reliability, security, and developer experience
• Experience leading platform or SRE initiatives in high-growth or startup environments
• Effective communicator with the ability to influence across teams and levels of the organization
• Passion for continuous improvement and mentoring other engineers