Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer, Cloud & Platform Engineering (Application Modernization - Agentic AI) Location: Onsite – Grapevine, TX (5 days/week) Employment Type: Full-Time Staff: 9 engineers About the Role We are seeking a Staff Engineer, Cloud & Platform Engineering to lead and influence the modernization of the technology platform, migrating legacy applications to a cloud-native architecture on AWS. This role is hands‑on and strategic, with a strong focus on application modernization, containerization, and cloud-native infrastructure. As a Staff Engineer, you will play a critical role in modernizing legacy Windows-based applications, building and evolving our application deployment pipelines, and leading migrations to Linux-based, containerized workloads running on AWS EKS. You will partner closely with application teams, DevOps, and leadership to ensure platforms are scalable, reliable, secure, and cost‑efficient. Key Responsibilities Platform & Infrastructure Leadership Lead the design, optimization, and evolution of AWS-native infrastructure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Serve as a technical authority for cloud and platform decisions, aligning infrastructure strategy with business objectives. Agentic AI & Infrastructure Automation Design, implement, and maintain agentic AI systems for self‑healing workflows, intelligent capacity planning, automated incident response, and infrastructure‑as‑code generation. Application Modernization & Migration Lead and support application modernization efforts, including refactoring and replatforming legacy applications. Drive migrations from Windows-based environments to Linux-based, containerized architectures. Partner with application teams to migrate legacy runtimes (including older .NET frameworks) into container-based deployments on AWS EKS. Kubernetes & Cloud Operations Design, manage, and optimize AWS EKS clusters, including capacity management, performance tuning, and cost optimization. Implement and maintain scalable deployment patterns using Kubernetes, autoscaling, and modern cloud-native practices. CI/CD & Automation Design and evolve CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and related tooling to support modern application delivery. Leverage Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate provisioning and ensure consistency across environments. Utilize Python and other scripting languages to improve automation and operational efficiency. Incident Management & Reliability Lead investigation and resolution of complex cloud and platform incidents. Ensure systems meet or exceed performance, reliability, and SLA expectations. Cost Optimization & Governance Partner cross‑functionally to identify and implement cloud cost optimization strategies, including use of cloud financial management tools. Ensure platform designs follow operational best practices and support long‑term maintainability. Collaboration & Influence Work independently while collaborating across engineering, application, and leadership teams. Mentor engineers and influence best practices across cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering functions. Required Qualifications Senior/Staff-level experience designing and managing large-scale IT infrastructure in cloud environments. Agentic AI Experience: Hands‑on experience with agentic AI systems for infrastructure automation (AI‑driven runbook execution, LLM-based ops tooling, autonomous remediation pipelines). Minimum 3 years of production‑grade Generative AI & Agentic AI implementations experience on cloud, devops, SRE & platform engineering. Strong hands‑on experience with AWS, including services such as EKS, Lambda, and supporting AWS‑native tooling. Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native deployment patterns. Proven experience with application modernization and migration projects, particularly replatforming legacy applications. Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, and DevOps methodologies. Experience using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code to manage cloud environments. Solid understanding of Linux‑based environments OR strong Windows-to-cloud migration experience with the ability to operate in Linux-based platforms. Experience driving cost optimization initiatives using data and cloud financial tools. Excellent communication and decision‑making skills, with the ability to influence across teams. Prior experience supporting retail or e-commerce platforms is strongly preferred. Preferred / Nice‑to‑Have Skills Experience migrating applications from Windows to Linux/container-based environments. Exposure to .NET application modernization, including legacy frameworks. Experience with Karpenter, cloud capacity optimization, and autoscaling strategies. Familiarity with InOps / FinOps practices. Strong scripting experience (Python preferred). Why This Role Direct ownership and influence over a major enterprise modernization initiative. Opportunity to shape how applications are built, deployed, and operated in a cloud-native environment. High‑impact role working with modern AWS and Kubernetes technologies at scale. #J-18808-Ljbffr