Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Senior Technical Ownership Role

This is a senior technical ownership role across Command|Link's platform engineering function. This is a high-leverage, high-autonomy role. You will drive architectural decisions, own complex delivery end-to-end, and set the engineering bar for the broader team.

You'll be central to our platform's next chapter: decomposing a mature PHP monolith into well-bounded Go microservices, developing our observability and data infrastructure, and scaling the distributed systems that underpin our global SaaS product. Our platform sits at the intersection of software and network infrastructure, integrating deeply with third-party APIs, telemetry pipelines, and real-world network systems. Engineers who thrive here tend to have strong instincts at both layers.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the decomposition of our PHP monolith into well-scoped discoverable Go microservices, making principled decisions about service boundaries, data contracts, and migration sequencing.
• Design, develop, and maintain scalable Go services, API gateways with auth and authorisation boundaries.
• Lead technical design and architecture discussions, balancing speed with long-term maintainability.
• Architect and evolve our distributed data infrastructure: event-driven pipelines (Kafka), durable workflow execution (Temporal), search and analytics (OpenSearch), and graph-based data modelling (Memgraph).
• Integrate with third-party APIs, telemetry systems, and network infrastructure, including SD-WAN controllers, VoIP platforms, and network device telemetry, to extend platform capabilities.
• Support Terraform-managed cloud infrastructure; enforce standards for reproducibility, security posture, and cost-aware architecture.
• Support SLAs SLOs, and CI/CD quality gates.
• Write clean, testable, well-documented Go and hold the team to the same standard through rigorous code reviews.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, and scalability gaps before they become customer problems.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, sharing best practices in software design, distributed systems, and network-aware system thinking.
• Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to a culture of operational excellence.
• Takes on additional responsibilities and projects as needed to support the success of the team and organization.

What you'll need for success:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant depth in backend systems and production-grade distributed architectures.
• Expert-level Go, including idiomatic patterns, concurrency model (goroutines, channels, context), standard library, and the judgment to know when not to reach for complexity.
• Practical experience with LLM development processes for success and minimising technical debt.
• Demonstrable experience decomposing a PHP monolith. You understand strangler fig patterns, anti-corruption layers, and how to migrate data ownership without big-bang rewrites.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes for container orchestration and OpenSearch for search and analytics workloads.
• Experience with Kafka or equivalent event streaming: topic design, consumer group management, back-pressure, and operational concerns at scale.
• Experience with Temporal for durable workflow orchestration: workflow/activity design, failure handling, and versioning.
• Experience with Memgraph or equivalent graph database: modelling connected data and integrating graph queries into application logic.
• Deep experience with; log management, custom metrics, dashboards, and monitors.
• Terraform for infrastructure as code: module design, state management, and multi-environment configuration.
• Solid understanding of relational and non-relational databases, query optimisation, and data modelling.
• Strong networking and systems fundamentals, including routing, switching, DNS, BGP, VLANs, or equivalent. You don't need to have built a router, but you need to be comfortable building systems that talk to them, reason about latency and protocol behaviour in production, and integrate with network device telemetry (SNMP, NetFlow, syslog, or similar).
• Comfort working across major cloud environments (AWS or Azure), including managed services, IAM, networking, and cost-aware architecture.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, since you'll be collaborating with distributed teams across time zones.
• An ownership mindset. You don't just close tickets. You understand the product, ask the right questions, push back on unnecessary complexity, and leave the codebase better than you found it.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with Steampipe, Osquery, or similar cloud asset inventory platforms
• Experience with stream processing frameworks such as Apache Flink
• Knowledge of data mesh or data fabric architectural patterns
• Background in network management at the ISP or MSP layer
• Background in cyber security
• Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects
• Exposure to SD-WAN, VoIP, BGP, or MPLS, or genuine curiosity about how enterprise networks are built and operated.
• gRPC and Protocol Buffers for service-to-service communication.
• Working knowledge of Python for tooling, scripting, or data work.
• Familiarity with stream processing platforms (Flink, Spark) at scale.

Why you'll love life at Command|Link

• Room to grow at a high-growth company
• An environment that celebrates ideas and innovation
• Your work will have a tangible impact
• Flexible time off
• Fun events at cool locations
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team

At CommandLink, we're committed to creating a fair, consistent, and efficient hiring experience. As part of our process, we use AI-assisted tools to help review and analyze applications. These tools support our recruiting team by identifying qualifications and experience that align with the requirements of each role.

AI tools are used only to assist in the evaluation process — they do not make final hiring decisions. Every application is reviewed by a member of our recruiting or hiring team before any decisions are made.