Senior Staff Engineer
Job Title: Senior Staff Engineer – Cloud Infrastructure / Kubernetes Contract Type / Duration: Contract – 12 Months Potential for Extension Location: Remote – United States Work Hours: 40 Hours per Week Job Summary / Overview We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership for the lifecycle and evolution of a large-scale Kubernetes compute platform supporting a multi-cloud infrastructure environment. This is a senior hands-on engineering role responsible for designing and building the foundational compute platform used by infrastructure and product engineering teams. The platform supports security, networking, developer experience, reliability, scalability, and cloud efficiency across multiple cloud providers. The ideal candidate comes from a cloud-native, DevOps, infrastructure, or platform engineering organization where Kubernetes is engineered and operated at significant production scale. This person should be capable of setting technical direction while remaining deeply hands-on with Kubernetes platform development. Top Required Skills (Ranked) Advanced Kubernetes Engineering – Deep hands-on Kubernetes experience, including writing custom Kubernetes controllers and building admission webhooks. Basic cluster administration is not sufficient. Go / Golang Development – Strong preference for engineers proficient in Go and capable of building production-grade cloud-native and Kubernetes platform components. Cloud Infrastructure / Platform Engineering at Scale – 12+ years of infrastructure experience with 4+ years working deeply with AWS, GCP, or Azure and experience building highly scalable production infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership for a large-scale Kubernetes compute platform Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and enhance Kubernetes platform capabilities Build Kubernetes controllers and platform automation Develop and maintain admission webhooks Improve platform reliability, scalability, security, and developer experience Drive cloud infrastructure cost efficiency and optimization Set technical direction for high-impact infrastructure initiatives Lead complex engineering projects spanning multiple teams Influence, mentor, and coach distributed engineering teams Establish alignment across engineering teams on architecture, priorities, outcomes, and timelines Contribute to the multi-year evolution and strategy of the cloud platform Improve engineering workflows and platform capabilities used by infrastructure and product teams Build consistent compute capabilities across multiple cloud providers Required Qualifications 12+ years of relevant infrastructure, platform, cloud, or systems engineering experience Advanced hands-on Kubernetes engineering experience Hands-on experience writing Kubernetes controllers Experience building and working with Kubernetes admission webhooks 4+ years of experience with at least one major public cloud: AWS GCP Azure Strong Infrastructure-as-a-Service knowledge Experience setting technical direction for large, complex engineering initiatives Experience successfully delivering projects spanning multiple engineering teams Strong software engineering background Experience designing and building highly available, scalable production infrastructure Strong focus on reliability, efficiency, quality, and developer experience Ability to provide technical leadership while remaining hands-on Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related discipline, or equivalent professional experience Preferred Skills / Nice to Have Go / Golang Istio Envoy Kubernetes Operators Kubernetes API development Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) Multi-cloud infrastructure Platform engineering Developer platforms / developer experience Cloud cost optimization Service mesh technologies Infrastructure automation Large-scale distributed systems Ideal Background Strong candidates will likely come from organizations where Kubernetes is a core production platform and engineers build or extend Kubernetes itself rather than simply consume it. Relevant backgrounds may include Cloud infrastructure engineering Kubernetes platform engineering Site Reliability Engineering Cloud-native infrastructure Developer platform engineering Distributed systems engineering Experience at cloud-native, DevOps, observability, infrastructure, or developer-platform companies is particularly relevant. What This Role Is NOT This is not a traditional Kubernetes administrator position. Candidates whose experience is primarily: Managing clusters through graphical interfaces Basic Kubernetes deployments Routine cluster operations Helm deployments without platform engineering Kubernetes monitoring only DevOps pipeline support without Kubernetes development Additional Notes Remote position within the United States This is a Senior Staff-level individual contributor / technical leadership position Candidates must be comfortable influencing and mentoring engineers without relying on direct management authority Deep hands-on engineering remains an important part of the position Candidate must be eligible for W-2 employment Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without current or future sponsorship