Staff Platform Engineer

Talently; Dallas (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Talently is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to own Google Cloud infrastructure and shape tooling and self-service capabilities for engineering teams. You will influence platform architecture, orchestration practices, and the technical foundations for scalable growth.

The role emphasizes autonomous ownership, high-availability systems, and collaboration across teams to enable reliable digital experiences at scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years in platform/infrastructure/SRE with production systems ownership.
• Deep hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience (networking, IAM, core services).
• Strong production Kubernetes experience with GKE ownership.
• Advanced Terraform and IaC across environments and projects.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Google Cloud infrastructure (GKE, Terraform, networking, IAM).
• Build internal tooling and self-service infra workflows for engineering teams.
• Design and operate platform capabilities: templates, CI/CD, IaC, routing.
• Establish best practices for GCP project organization and access management.
• Lead architecture decisions and drive initiatives from problem definition to production.
• Define reliability objectives and strengthen observability, DR, and on-call readiness.
• Manage complex migrations with minimal downtime and optimize cloud costs.
• Review changes, mentor engineers, and contribute to a collaborative on-call rotation.

Skills

Platform engineering

GCP experience

GKE ownership

Terraform / IaC

Go / Python

CI/CD tooling

SRE ownership

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

GKE

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Redis

Cloudflare

CI/CD pipelines

AI-assisted coding tools

Job description

About the Technology Company / The Opportunity:

A growing tech company is building a next-generation cloud platform to support digital experiences at scale. As Staff Platform Engineer, you will take meaningful ownership of Google Cloud infrastructure and help shape the systems, tools, and self-service capabilities that empower engineering teams to deliver reliably and efficiently. This autonomous, hands-on role offers significant influence over platform architecture, engineering practices, and the technical foundations for continued growth.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve Google Cloud infrastructure, including GKE clusters, Terraform, networking, IAM, and supporting services.
• Build internal tooling and self-service infrastructure workflows that help engineering teams provision and manage resources independently.
• Design and operate platform capabilities, including templates, CI/CD workflows, infrastructure automation, and GKE Gateway API routing.
• Establish consistent practices for GCP project organization, access management, infrastructure as code, and environment management.
• Lead architecture decisions, document tradeoffs, and drive technical initiatives from problem definition through production.
• Define reliability objectives with service owners and strengthen observability, incident response, disaster recovery, and operational readiness.
• Lead complex infrastructure migrations with minimal downtime while planning capacity and optimizing cloud costs.
• Review infrastructure changes, mentor engineers, and contribute to a collaborative rotational on-call schedule.

Must-Have Skills:

• 10+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, backend engineering, or a related discipline, including production systems ownership.
• Deep, hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience, including cloud networking, IAM, and core GCP services.
• Strong production Kubernetes experience, ideally with significant ownership of GKE environments.
• Advanced Terraform and infrastructure-as-code experience, including modules and state management across environments and GCP projects.
• Experience building internal engineering tools, developer platforms, infrastructure software, or developer productivity solutions.
• Production-quality software engineering experience in Go, Python, or a similar language.
• Experience supporting high-scale production environments and leading infrastructure migrations with minimal or zero downtime.
• Ability to work autonomously, exercise sound technical judgment, and influence architecture and engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of reliability, scalability, performance, and cloud cost tradeoffs, with clear written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and practical familiarity with AI-assisted coding tools.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Google Cloud, SRE, or Kubernetes certifications, such as Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or CKA.
• Experience with Cloudflare, including WAF and bot management.
• Experience operating Redis at scale, including clustered deployments.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.
• Experience building or improving on-call and incident management programs.
• Experience creating an internal developer platform or self-service infrastructure platform from an early stage.