Staff DevOps Engineer, Developer Experience (DevEx)

Accountabilities:: Set and drive the technical roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform, establishing long-term platform strategy rather than simply executing an existing plan. Author and review RFCs, architecture documents, and technical proposals adopted across multiple engineering teams, serving as an architecture reviewer for infrastructure-impacting changes. Act as a senior escalation point for high-severity platform incidents, leading retrospectives and translating findings into structural improvements. Mentor senior and staff-level engineers while raising engineering standards around platform architecture, reliability, security, and software delivery. Own and evolve the Internal Developer Platform as a product, including Backstage service/API/group catalogs, golden-path scaffolder templates, and CI/CD components. Partner with software, data, security, and product engineering leaders to identify systemic development friction and address it through automation, standardization, and platform abstraction. Define standards for AI-assisted and agentic development workflows, evaluating and rolling out appropriate coding-agent tools with effective security and governance controls. Own the architecture of CI/CD orchestration, including GitLab CI/CD and reusable components, supporting rapid releases, strong security controls, and local-to-production consistency. Standardize build, testing, and deployment practices across application and data workloads and lead the evolution of GitOps-based deployment strategies. Own the architecture and lifecycle of multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms across AWS and GCP environments, including upgrades, node lifecycle management, networking, and security. Establish cloud IAM, networking, security, and Infrastructure-as-Code standards across multiple accounts and environments using technologies such as Terraform and Crossplane. Lead service mesh architecture and policies across multi-cluster environments, including Istio configuration, sidecar strategies, and traffic controls. Own critical platform systems such as GitOps tooling, secrets management, and service mesh as production-grade services. Define observability strategy across platforms, balancing actionable telemetry and signal quality with infrastructure and data costs. Drive FinOps practices for platform infrastructure, including cost visibility, unit economics, and waste reduction. Establish and evolve organization-wide SLIs, SLOs, alerting strategies, and incident-response practices while promoting a blameless postmortem culture. Requirements: 10+ years of overall engineering experience, including meaningful hands-on software development experience in Go, Python, Java, or similar languages. 7+ years of experience designing, building, and operating cloud infrastructure at significant scale. Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across multiple teams through architecture decisions, RFCs, platform strategy, and cross-functional influence. Deep hands-on experience designing and operating multi-account, multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms in production, particularly EKS and/or GKE environments supporting dozens or more services or clusters. Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform and Crossplane, combined with organizational-scale GitOps practices using Flux, Argo CD, or comparable technologies. Extensive experience designing and operating CI/CD platforms that support high release velocity while maintaining strong security and governance controls, with GitLab CI/CD experience preferred. Hands-on experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio in multi-cluster environments, including security and traffic policies. Strong experience building and operating observability platforms using technologies such as Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, or Thanos, with a strong focus on cost efficiency. Working knowledge of container and software supply-chain security, including image scanning, hardened base images, vulnerability remediation, and related practices. Experience owning or substantially contributing to cloud cost governance and FinOps initiatives. Familiarity with AI-assisted and agentic development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent, along with the ability to establish practical approaches for safe organizational adoption. Strong understanding of SLIs, SLOs, alerting, and incident response, including experience leading blameless postmortems rather than simply participating in them. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence through technical documentation, architecture reviews, presentations, and collaborative decision-making. Ability to work effectively across engineering, data, security, and product organizations and translate complex infrastructure challenges into scalable solutions. Experience supporting data pipeline and batch-processing platforms such as Airflow, EMR, or Dataproc is a plus. Benefits: Fully remote position based in the United States. Opportunity to shape developer experience and platform strategy across an entire engineering organization. High-impact technical leadership role with significant influence over cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, security, reliability, and engineering standards. Opportunity to work with a modern technology stack spanning AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Crossplane, GitOps, service mesh, CI/CD, observability, and AI-assisted development tooling. Strong opportunities for mentorship, technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration. Inclusive working environment focused on diversity, belonging, professional growth, and equal opportunity. Encouragement to apply even when candidates do not meet every listed qualification, provided they have the experience and capabilities to succeed in the role. Opportunity to contribute to systems and standards designed to help engineering teams move quickly while maintaining reliability, security, and operational excellence.