Location: Austin, TX
Salary: $75.00 USD Hourly - $80.00 USD Hourly
Description: Our client is currently seeking a Senior Staff Platform Engineer, Event Streaming & AI Enablement
Location: Austin, TX, USA (Hybrid: 4 days on-site per week)
About the Role As a Senior Staff Platform Engineer, you will drive the architecture, reliability, and security of enterprise-scale distributed streaming infrastructure across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments. In this role, you will integrate advanced AI tools and agentic workflows directly into the software development life cycle (SDLC) and operations, leading high-visibility initiatives that scale messaging platforms, automate operations, and deliver mission-critical data streaming capabilities.
Responsibilities - Platform Architecture & Security: Architect and execute resilient, highly available Confluent Kafka deployments spanning on-premise and public cloud environments; enforce zero-trust security postures encompassing authentication, fine-grained authorization, encryption-in-transit/at-rest, and network isolation.
- Streaming Architecture & Data Governance: Define best practices for stream processing, event-driven pipelines, and schema governance using Avro, Protobuf, and JSON Schema across high-throughput enterprise systems.
- AI-Driven Operations & SDLC Modernization: Design, build, and deploy intelligent AI agents and multi-agent orchestration frameworks to automate platform workflows, optimize code quality, accelerate delivery, and modernize systems operations.
- Infrastructure Automation & Reliability: Develop self-service operational tooling, automated provisioning, and CI/CD pipelines utilizing Python, Ansible, and modern deployment frameworks to eliminate operational toil.
- Incident Management & Root Cause Remediation: Direct triage efforts during mission-critical outages, conduct exhaustive post-incident root-cause analyses (RCA), and lead systemic remediation to prevent recurrence.
- Technical Leadership & Stakeholder Partnership: Serve as a subject matter expert and strategic advisor to engineering teams, cross-functional partners, and executive stakeholders on event streaming and AI-augmented platform engineering.
Minimum Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10 years of experience in distributed systems, messaging infrastructure, and enterprise-scale platform engineering.
- 5 years of hands-on experience designing, operating, and tuning Confluent Kafka platforms across both on-premise and public cloud environments.
- Hands-on experience developing autonomous AI agents or implementing agentic orchestration frameworks to automate technical workflows.
- Demonstrated experience with infrastructure automation, configuration management, and scripting (e.g., Python, Ansible, CI/CD toolchains).
- Deep understanding of Linux/Unix internals, kernel performance tuning, network protocols, and platform security standards.
Preferred Qualifications - Experience operating event-driven architectures in highly regulated, high-compliance enterprise environments.
- Practical expertise with AI-assisted software development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, programmatic LLM integration, advanced prompt engineering, and RAG architectures).
- Working knowledge of modern configuration management and continuous delivery platforms such as Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Puppet, or Chef.
- Active industry certifications, such as Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator or professional-level Cloud Architecture certifications (Google Cloud Platform, AWS, or Azure).
- Proven track record of leading complex technical escalations, high-stakes incident remediation, and cross-organizational platform standardizations.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance are available to qualified candidates who meet eligibility requirements.
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