Staff Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer

Roark is currently building out its data and analytics team, with the goal of better leveraging advanced analytic solutions to make sound investment decisions and guide owned businesses to profitable growth. To ensure robust data and delivery of analytics solutions, we are seeking a Staff Platform Engineer familiar with the full development lifecycle and experience working collaboratively with technical teams. The Software Engineer will be responsible for implementing software engineering solutions, developing robust data pipelines, and building production ready analytics tools delivered through modern UIs. The role will require collaboration with Roark's less technical teams to understand data and extensive collaboration across the Data and Analytics team in the buildout of analytics and AI products. An ideal candidate will have full stack experience building and delivering successful analytics products.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, including compute, networking, storage, and managed services, to support the full data and analytics product portfolio
• Architect and own end-to-end CI/CD pipelines that enable reliable, repeatable deployments across development, staging, and production environments
• Establish and enforce DevOps best practices including infrastructure-as-code, automated testing, environment parity, deployment strategies, and rollback capabilities
• Define and implement the security posture for cloud environments, including identity and access management (IAM), secrets management, network security, and compliance controls
• Partner with software engineers and data engineers to embed platform and security standards into the development lifecycle without impeding team velocity
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation for platform-level outages and performance degradation; build toward proactive observability and alerting
• Evaluate and introduce emerging platform technologies, DevOps tooling, and security frameworks that improve reliability, efficiency, or risk posture
• Develop and document platform standards, runbooks, and onboarding guides to promote consistency and self-sufficiency across engineering teams
• Partner with IT Cybersecurity to align data and analytics platform controls with firm-wide security policies, vulnerability management programs, and audit requirements
• Partner with IT Cloud Engineering to coordinate shared infrastructure standards, optimize cross-team resource utilization, and ensure consistent governance across Roark's cloud environment
• Remain a hands-on individual contributor, directly authoring infrastructure code and software applications, building and maintaining pipelines, and solving complex platform problems alongside the engineering team

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or related field
• 10+ years of relevant experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related discipline
• Demonstrated experience designing and managing cloud infrastructure at scale, with strong hands-on proficiency in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or comparable hyperscaler (AWS, Azure)
• Deep experience building and maintaining CI/CD systems using tools such as Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins, or equivalent
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools, particularly Terraform, and experience managing environments through code-driven workflows
• Working knowledge of container orchestration using Kubernetes or Cloud Run, including deployment patterns, scaling, and operational management
• Experience implementing cloud security controls including IAM policies, VPC configuration, secrets management (e.g., Secret Manager, Vault), and audit logging
• Programming proficiency in Python, Bash, or similar scripting languages for automation and tooling
• Demonstrated ability to communicate platform concepts and security posture to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience supporting data engineering or analytics teams, including familiarity with data pipeline infrastructure (e.g., BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Cloud Composer)
• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Cloud Monitoring, Datadog, or Grafana, including SLO/SLA definition and alerting design
• Familiarity with platform security frameworks and compliance requirements relevant to financial services or investment management environments
• Experience establishing and maturing a DevOps or platform function within a greenfield or rapidly scaling organization
• Exposure to cost optimization strategies for cloud environments, including resource right-sizing, committed use discounts, and FinOps practices
• Experience with Flask, Postgres, or other application-layer technologies that inform infrastructure design decisions
• Experience working with AI coding assistant tools to increase development pace and productivity, such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar

Characteristics

• Operates with a high degree of ownership; takes initiative on platform gaps without waiting to be asked
• High standards of integrity, accountability, character, and professionalism
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, particularly in diagnosing complex, multi-layer infrastructure issues under pressure
• Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills; able to translate infrastructure risk and tradeoffs into clear business terms
• Strong commitment to delivering secure, reliable, and well-documented platform capabilities that enable the broader engineering organization to move quickly
• Ability to manage competing infrastructure priorities in a fast-paced environment, balancing reliability, velocity, and security
• Strong sense of urgency, adaptability, flexibility, and resourcefulness; thrives in ambiguous, high-growth environments
• Entrepreneurial, agile mindset; excited to build a world-class platform function from the ground up
• Quick learner with high curiosity; stays current on evolving cloud-native, DevOps, and security tooling
• Collaborative by default; finds satisfaction in enabling other engineers to ship more reliably and with greater confidence