Staff Platform Engineer

Job Summary: 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr