Senior Platform Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Gridware

Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit 

Role Description

As Gridware grows, the number of services, environments, and engineers grows with it. We need a senior engineer who treats developer experience as a product — designing paved paths, golden templates, and self-service tooling on top of our AWS / Kubernetes / Argo CD foundation so that teams can focus on the grid, not on YAML.

You will sit alongside our DevOps and Cloud Security engineers. While they own the underlying cloud infrastructure and security posture, you will own the layer above: the workflows, abstractions, and tooling that engineers interact with every day. As a founding member of the platform function, you’ll shape the technical vision, drive cross-team adoption, and measure success by how invisible (and reliable) the platform feels to the rest of engineering.

• Lead the design, build, and rollout of an internal developer platform on top of AWS, EKS, Argo CD, and GitHub Actions that lets engineers create, deploy, and operate services with minimal friction.
• Own and evolve our service templates, Helm chart conventions, and Argo CD App-of-Apps patterns so that adding or migrating a service is a guided, low-risk experience.
• Build and maintain reusable GitHub Actions workflows (build / push / scan, frontend build / deploy, SonarQube scans, semantic release) and improve CI feedback loops, build times, and caching.
• Define and enforce platform standards for observability — structured logs into Loki, metrics into Prometheus / Mimir, dashboards in Grafana, and SLOs / alerts wired in by default.
• Build self-service tooling around environments, secrets, feature flags, and access — so that the right thing is easy and the wrong thing is hard to do by accident.
• Own the developer-facing aspects of identity and access (Auth0, IdP integrations, Tailscale access, IRSA / service accounts) and keep onboarding and offboarding smooth.
• Partner with DevOps on infrastructure changes, with Cloud Security on guardrails, and with backend / frontend / data / firmware teams to understand their pain points and prioritize platform investments.
• Mentor engineers across the org on platform conventions, lead design reviews for new services, and push back on patterns that don’t scale.
• Treat the platform as a product: gather feedback, define roadmaps, write docs, and measure adoption and reliability.

• 5+ years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles, including significant experience building and shipping developer-facing tooling for other engineering teams.
• Track record of owning and delivering platform initiatives end-to-end, from design through adoption, with limited day-to-day supervision.
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes (EKS or similar) and GitOps workflows with Argo CD or Flux.
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform; comfort with Terragrunt or a similar wrapper.
• Solid experience with CI/CD systems, ideally GitHub Actions, including reusable / composable workflows and release automation.
• Working knowledge of AWS core services (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, ECR) and how to compose them into reliable, secure platforms.
• Experience designing developer abstractions — Helm charts, service templates, internal CLIs, scaffolding tools, or Backstage-style portals — that other engineering teams easily interact with.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Bash, or TypeScript for building tooling and automation.
• Experience integrating observability (Grafana, Loki, Prometheus / Mimir, OpenTelemetry, or similar).

• Experience building or operating Apollo Router / GraphQL federation gateways and supporting subgraph development workflows.
• Experience with Backstage or a comparable internal developer portal.
• Experience integrating Argo Workflows or similar Kubernetes-native job / pipeline runners into a developer platform.
• Familiarity with Databricks or ML Ops pipelines and the developer experience around data / model deployment.
• Experience with Tailscale, Auth0, EntraID, or other identity / zero-trust networking tooling.
• Familiarity with cloud architectures supporting IoT / embedded systems and distributed, low-power devices.
• Experience in high-growth startup environments where you must wear many hats.

This describes the ideal candidate; many of us have picked up this expertise along the way. Even if you meet only part of this list, we encourage you to apply!

Benefits

Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered) 

Paid parental leave 

Alternating day off (every other Monday)

“Off the Grid”, a two week per year paid break for all employees. 

Commuter allowance 

Company-paid training