Staff Platform Engineer

Description

The Staff Platform Engineer sets the technical direction for the platform and solves infrastructure problems that span teams. The role stays hands‑on — writing and reviewing infrastructure code and operating production systems — but most of its impact comes from shaping how the whole engineering organization builds, deploys, and runs software, without formal management authority. Staff engineers may also serve as a team’s Tech Lead, a role that carries no change in title, band, or bonus.

Key Responsibilities

• Regularly audit and evaluate the platform’s architecture, and lead the design and delivery of major
• architectural changes across teams on an annual basis.
• Write technical proposals for those changes and build agreement on them with product and engineering
• stakeholders.
• Set org-wide standards for infrastructure patterns, delivery practices, tooling, and technology choices.
• Partner with Buyer and Cargo engineering leadership so the platform supports what their teams need to build
• next.
• Define observability, reliability, and incident standards, and take on the hardest production problems: systemic
• bottlenecks, performance crises, and failures under heavy contention.
• Plan and carry out large migrations, such as database moves, network re‑architecture, and project
• restructuring, without disrupting live auctions.
• Own the platform’s security, cost, and capacity strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier, influencing direction without formal authority.

Requirements

Qualifications / Requirements

• Autonomy: Leads strategy — defines technical direction without day‑to‑day oversight.
• Technical Depth: Visionary — deep expertise with the ability to see and shape the broader technical landscape.
• Leadership Impact: Force multiplier and system architect — makes entire teams more effective.
• Business Impact: Strategic — future‑proofs systems and drives technical decisions that enable business growth.
• Experience: 7-10+ years of professional engineering experience, with a demonstrated record of infrastructure or platform impact across teams.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Advanced study in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline (Master’s or equivalent graduate‑level work) is a strong differentiator at this level.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript and strong proficiency in Go or Python.
• Infrastructure as Code: Sets standards for infrastructure as code — state management, resource lifecycle, refactoring and aliasing, and reusable component design. Pulumi in TypeScript is a strong plus.
• Cloud: GCP architecture expertise — designs for reliability, cost efficiency, and scale across GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and BigQuery.
• Networking: Network architecture expertise — multi-project VPC design, private service connectivity, load balancing, mTLS, and traffic management.
• Databases: Deep expertise in operating MySQL, PostgreSQL, and distributed SQL — replication, connection pooling, schema evolution at scale, and zero‑downtime migrations.
• Observability: Designs and owns observability strategy — alerting, SLOs/SLAs, and distributed tracing.
• Security: Understands security at the architecture level — auth patterns, secrets management, network security, IAM, and defending against abusive traffic.
• Technical Fundamentals: Expert-level distributed systems knowledge — consensus, replication strategies, concurrency control under write contention, exactly‑once semantics, and fault‑tolerant design; OS and runtime internals relevant to performance (GC behavior, syscall overhead, context switching); systems design fluency — can decompose and reason about large‑scale distributed architectures from first principles.

Nice to Have

• Temporal or other durable workflow orchestration.
• CockroachDB, PgBouncer, or large‑scale database migration and replication.
• Cloud Armor, WAF, or bot‑mitigation experience.
• Vertex AI or other ML serving infrastructure.
• Experience architecting systems with heavy write contention, such as many users acting on the same records at once in bidding, inventory, or payments.

Physical Requirements

• Ability to remain seated or stationary for extended periods while working at a computer.
• Frequent use of hands and fingers for typing, mouse use, and other computer‑related tasks.
• Ability to communicate effectively in person, by phone, and through electronic communication.
• Ability to occasionally stand, walk, bend, reach, or move about the office.
• Ability to occasionally lift and carry office equipment or materials up to 10–15 pounds.
• Visual ability sufficient to read computer screens, documents, and other work‑related materials.
• Ability to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation.