The posting
Senior Platform Engineer (Crossplane)
Type: Remote | Brazil Coverage: Pacific Hours (8:00 AM – 5:00 PM PST)
Job Description:
We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to build and operate the cloud-native infrastructure powering a large-scale data platform that processes approximately 400,000 pipelines daily. This is a hands-on infrastructure engineering role: you will design and operate production Kubernetes platforms, build and extend infrastructure capabilities using Crossplane, and develop services, controllers, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on.
The work spans Kubernetes platform architecture, infrastructure orchestration, networking, observability, and production operations. You will work with Kubernetes APIs, Crossplane, Terraform, GitOps, and production software development to build reusable, self-service infrastructure capabilities. We are looking for someone comfortable owning ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives and driving them independently from design through production.
Key Responsibilities:
Platform and Kubernetes Engineering:
- Design, build, and operate production Kubernetes clusters, including cluster networking, workload isolation, and multi-region topologies.
- Build and extend infrastructure orchestration capabilities using Crossplane, Kubernetes custom resources, controllers, and operators.
- Work with Kubernetes internals: resource quota management, scheduling and cluster behavior, NetworkPolicy enforcement, and reconciliation patterns.
- Develop reusable, self-service platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to provision and manage infrastructure consistently.
- Implement and operate service mesh capabilities: mTLS between services, service-account-level authentication and authorization, and traffic management across internal and external request paths.
- Optimize containerized workloads for performance, cost, resource efficiency, and blast-radius reduction.
Software Development in Go, Python, or Java:
- Write, refactor, and maintain production services, Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform middleware, preferably in Go.
- Work with Kubernetes APIs, custom resources, reconciliation loops, and Go-templated YAML to extend infrastructure capabilities.
- Read and contribute to complex existing codebases, including open-source projects that we customize or extend.
- Build HTTP, REST, and gRPC service interfaces used by internal engineering teams.
- Write meaningful unit and integration tests, and treat testability as a design property rather than an afterthought.
Reliability and Production Operations:
- Lead incident response for platform-level issues; investigate root causes and implement durable fixes.
- Troubleshoot production Kubernetes infrastructure and distributed systems using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
- Design resilient infrastructure with appropriate workload isolation, failure-domain boundaries, and blast-radius reduction.
- Diagnose and resolve performance, capacity, and reliability problems across distributed systems and data-intensive workloads.
- Define and drive SLOs, and build the alerting that makes them actionable.
Infrastructure as Code and Delivery:
- Design, build, and maintain reusable Terraform modules and Crossplane infrastructure abstractions consumed by other engineering teams.
- Develop and evolve infrastructure provisioning and orchestration workflows using Crossplane, Terraform, and GitOps.
- Build and improve CI/CD and GitOps delivery workflows so that teams can ship safely and frequently.
- Balance developer velocity against reliability, security, and compliance requirements.
- Support cloud migration initiatives, including moving production infrastructure between cloud providers or environments while maintaining reliability and minimizing downtime.
Observability:
- Build and maintain metrics, dashboards, alerting policies, and distributed tracing.
- Instrument platform components and infrastructure services so that failures are diagnosable without a code change.
Collaboration:
- Partner with data engineering, product, security, and infrastructure teams to gather requirements and align on architecture.
- Contribute to design reviews and help set technical direction for the data platform.
- Mentor other engineers and raise the standard of platform engineering practices.
- Independently drive complex infrastructure initiatives, communicating technical decisions, trade-offs, and progress to stakeholders.
Qualifications:
Education and Experience:
- 7+ years of professional experience in software, platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering, including significant experience operating production distributed systems.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating production Kubernetes platforms, not only deploying applications onto them.
- Production software development experience in Go, Python, or Java, with Go strongly preferred.
- Experience building infrastructure or internal developer platforms consumed by multiple engineering teams.
- Experience designing, developing, and maintaining reusable Terraform modules or equivalent infrastructure abstractions.
- Experience independently designing systems from an ambiguous starting point and carrying them through implementation and production.
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Technical Skills:
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals: networking (CNI), NetworkPolicy, resource management, scheduling, cluster lifecycle, and behavior under load.
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes APIs, custom resources, controllers/operators, and reconciliation patterns.
- Strong production coding experience building and maintaining services or platform tooling, preferably in Go.
- Experience with declarative infrastructure orchestration and provisioning; Crossplane experience is highly preferred.
- Infrastructure as Code at scale, particularly Terraform module design and ownership.
- Strong understanding of GitOps practices, preferably with Argo CD.
- Hands-on experience with a service mesh (Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, or similar), including mTLS and workload identity.
- Solid Linux fundamentals, including cgroups, networking, and resource management.
- Production experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure); multi-cloud experience is a strong plus.
- Observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and query languages such as PromQL.
- Production experience with relational databases, including PostgreSQL or managed Postgres-compatible services, and an understanding of replication and failover characteristics.
- Docker and container tooling as part of the delivery lifecycle.
- Strong debugging and performance profiling skills.
Preferred:
- Hands-on Crossplane experience, including Compositions, XRDs, providers, managed resources, or custom infrastructure abstractions.
- Open-source contributions to CNCF or Kubernetes ecosystem projects such as Crossplane, KEDA, Argo CD, Strimzi, or Envoy.
- Experience with large-scale data platforms and technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Apache Spark.
- Experience with Alibaba Cloud (AliCloud), particularly production infrastructure or cloud migrations.
- Experience designing resilient distributed systems using cell-based architectures, workload isolation, and blast-radius reduction.
- Kubernetes certifications such as CKA, CKAD, or KCNA.
- Experience with Go testing frameworks such as Ginkgo and Gomega.
- Additional strength in Python.
- Experience with identity and access management: SSO, Keycloak, OIDC, SAML, or secret management with Vault or a cloud equivalent.
- Experience designing for high availability and disaster recovery across regions or providers.
- Experience working in a monorepo and with build systems such as Bazel.
- Ability to read Java.
- Exposure to compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or GDPR.
- Participation in the Kubernetes/CNCF community, including KubeCon attendance, speaking, or open-source contributions.
Soft Skills:
- Strong analytical and problem-solving ability.
- Clear written and verbal communication, particularly in design documents, technical trade-offs, and cross-team requirements gathering.
- Highly autonomous and proactive, with the ability to identify infrastructure gaps, propose solutions, and drive implementation.
- Able to independently own complex platform engineering initiatives from design through production.
- Comfortable in a fast-moving, highly technical environment.
Please Note:
This is a hands-on Kubernetes platform engineering role focused on infrastructure orchestration for a large-scale data platform. We are not looking for candidates whose experience is primarily CI/CD, application deployment, cloud architecture, or consuming managed Kubernetes services.
The ideal candidate has built and operated production Kubernetes infrastructure, developed reusable platform capabilities consumed by other engineering teams, and has strong production software engineering experience. Experience with Crossplane and Go is particularly valuable, alongside the ability to independently own complex infrastructure problems and explain the architecture, implementation, and operational trade-offs behind the systems they build.
