Staff Platform Engineer

Talently; United States; Remote; USD 175,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Talently is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to own Google Cloud infrastructure, focusing on GKE, Terraform, and tooling that improves developer productivity. This remote role offers influence over platform architecture and engineering practices, helping scale a next-generation cloud platform.

The ideal candidate has 10+ years in platform/infrastructure roles, deep GCP experience, and strong leadership in migration and reliability initiatives.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform/infrastructure engineering or related fields with production ownership.
• Deep hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience (networking, IAM, core GCP services).
• Strong Kubernetes experience with ownership of GKE environments.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Google Cloud infrastructure (GKE, Terraform, networking, IAM).
• Build internal tooling and self-service workflows for resource provisioning.
• Design and operate platform capabilities, including CI/CD, IaC, and GKE routing.

Skills

GCP experience

Kubernetes (GKE)

Terraform

Go

Python

SRE/Infra ownership

CI/CD

Cloud cost optimization

Autonomous work style

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Job description

Job Title: Staff Platform Engineer

Location: Remote

Salary: $175,000-$200,000

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.