Senior STAFF Platform Engineer

Ellkay; New Jersey; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Ellkay is seeking a Senior Staff Platform Engineer to own and elevate our platform reliability across AWS, Azure, and on-prem in a hybrid model.

You will design scalable infrastructure, drive Terraform modules, build CI/CD for Kubernetes/Docker workloads, and lead incident response with cross-functional teams to improve SLIs/SLOs. Strong scripting, security, and cost governance are essential.

Qualifications

• 11+ years in platform engineering, infra, DevOps, or SRE with staff-level scope and impact.
• Production-grade AWS and Azure, plus on-prem infrastructure in a hybrid model.
• Expert Terraform — module design, state management, environment strategy at scale.
• CI/CD pipelines for Kubernetes and Docker workloads.
• Configuration management tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar).
• Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Splunk) and meaningful SLIs/SLOs.
• Leading production incident response and reliability improvements.
• Cloud cost governance and security/compliance in multi-cloud or hybrid.
• Strong scripting/programming (Python, Go, Bash) for automation.
• Excellent cross-functional communication with SRE, security, and engineering leadership.

Skills

Staff-level leadership

Cross-functional communication

Automation mindset

Reliability engineering

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Ansible

Chef

Puppet

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

ELK/Splunk

Job description

Requirements

• 11+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles, with demonstrated staff-level scope and impact.
• Deep, production-grade experience with both AWS and Azure, plus experience managing on-premises infrastructure in a hybrid model.
• Expert-level Terraform experience — module design, state management, workspace/environment strategy at scale.
• Strong experience building CI/CD pipelines for Kubernetes and Docker-based workloads.
• Hands-on experience with configuration management tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar).
• Proven track record implementing observability stacks (e. g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK/Splunk) and defining meaningful SLIs/SLOs.
• Demonstrated experience leading production incident response and driving reliability improvements.
• Experience designing cloud cost governance and security/compliance frameworks in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment.
• Strong scripting/programming ability (Python, Go, or Bash) for automation and tooling.
• Excellent cross-functional communication — able to work directly with SRE, security, and engineering leadership.