Senior Platform Engineer - Remote & Equity Eligible

Sierra Ventures; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary annual bonus

New hire equity grant

Comprehensive health plans

401K with company matching

Paid Parental Leave

Flexible time off

Job summary

Gemini is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the internal engineering platform that powers production systems globally. You will create self-service tools, automation, and reusable platform primitives to improve velocity, reliability, and security across engineering teams.

You will work across cloud, networking, compute, storage, and CI/CD, applying SLOs, error budgets, and security-by-default principles to deliver scalable platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, or an equivalent combination of experience, including meaningful ownership of production systems.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one language such as Go, Python, Java, Rust, or similar, with experience building maintainable services, automation, CLIs, APIs, or developer tools - not only scripts or one-off configuration.
• Demonstrated experience operating infrastructure and distributed systems in production, including diagnosing failures, managing capacity, improving performance, and designing for high availability and recovery.
• Experience designing, operating, or improving production systems across cloud infrastructure, networking, compute, storage, deployment platforms, or related infrastructure domains.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure and infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or an equivalent system.
• Experience with containers and orchestration, such as Kubernetes, EKS, GKE, Docker, or Nomad, including workload deployment, networking, security, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience owning and managing cloud network security controls, including network firewalls, DNS filtering, and network segmentation.
• Experience designing or improving CI/CD and automated software delivery systems, including testing, deployment, progressive rollout, rollback, and change validation.
• Practical experience with observability: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, dashboards, and production health models. Familiarity with OpenTelemetry or comparable tooling is valuable.
• Working knowledge of SLOs, error budgets, incident response, blameless postmortems, and techniques for reducing operational toil.
• Experience with high-availability architectures, capacity planning, failure recovery, and the operational tradeoffs required to run critical systems at scale.
• Experience building secure-by-default systems and collaborating with security teams on identity, access control, secrets, supply-chain security, and policy enforcement.
• Experience working with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet is useful, but configuration management alone is not sufficient for this role.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technologies and domains quickly, including the infrastructure and reliability characteristics of data-intensive, event-driven, or AI/ML workloads.
• Strong technical communication and leadership skills; able to explain tradeoffs, influence across teams, mentor others, and turn ambiguous problems into shipped systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain platform services, APIs, CLIs, controllers, and automation in languages such as Go, Python, or similar; own them through design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation.
• Build self-service capabilities that let engineers provision environments, deploy services, manage infrastructure, and respond to operational conditions safely without relying on manual platform intervention.
• Create and evolve paved paths for service development and delivery, including templates, libraries, deployment workflows, policy-as-code, and reusable platform primitives.
• Design and improve the cloud, compute, storage, identity, and infrastructure primitives used by engineering teams.
• Design and operate core network infrastructure — VPCs, Cloud Routing, and security controls across public clouds and regions.
• Operate and improve the compute, container, networking, and cloud foundations that support critical services and emerging workloads, including distributed and AI-enabled systems where appropriate.
• Improve the systems and workflows used to provision infrastructure, connect services, deliver changes, and recover from failures across environments.
• Define and use service-level indicators, SLOs, error budgets, and production-readiness standards to make reliability and launch decisions explicit and measurable.
• Improve observability, alerting, capacity planning, performance, and failure handling; design systems that degrade gracefully, roll out progressively, and recover automatically where safe.
• Participate in an appropriately staffed on-call rotation, lead incident response when needed, and turn incidents and recurring operational work into permanent improvements through blameless postmortems and follow-through.
• Reduce toil deliberately. Measure repetitive operational work, automate or eliminate it, and keep the team focused primarily on engineering work that improves reliability, scale, security, cost, or developer experience.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on architecture, productionization, and technical design; provide guidance without becoming a ticket-based operations layer.
• Establish technical direction through design documents, prototypes, testing, metrics, and iterative delivery. Make pragmatic tradeoffs while preserving clear interfaces and room for future evolution.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Rust

System design

Leadership

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Ansible

Git

Job description

Gemini is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the internal engineering platform that powers production systems globally. You will create self-service tools, automation, and reusable platform primitives to improve velocity, reliability, and security across engineering teams.

You will work across cloud, networking, compute, storage, and CI/CD, applying SLOs, error budgets, and security-by-default principles to deliver scalable platforms.