Staff Platform Engineer: Cloud & Platform Leadership

horizon3ai; United States; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, vision & dental insurance

Flexible vacation policy

Generous parental leave

Equity package

Job summary

Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join our Internal Platform Team (IPT) and shape the cloud and delivery foundations behind NodeZero. You will lead cross-team initiatives, define platform direction, and improve developer workflows with secure, reliable, and self-service capabilities.

You are a hands-on technical leader with 8+ years in platform engineering, deep AWS and Kubernetes experience, and a track record of building scalable automation with Terraform or Crossplane.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial production-platform ownership.
• Deep experience designing and operating cloud platforms, preferably AWS.
• Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, networking, reliability, and troubleshooting.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code and automation experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or comparable tools.
• Experience operating CI/CD and delivery infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of IAM, secrets, networking, ingress, and least privilege.
• Experience with distributed-systems observability and operational practices.
• Proficiency in Go and Python for platform services, developer tooling, or automation.
• Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication, mentoring, and technical-influence skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, and shared platform services.
• Define architecture for infrastructure automation, service delivery, regional capabilities, and ephemera…,
• Drive high-impact initiatives across multiple teams and balance reliability, security, cost, developer experience, and delivery speed.
• Establish platform standards, reduce technical debt, and guide design decisions.
• Partner with feature teams to turn platform needs into durable solutions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across Engineering.
• Improve documentation, runbooks, interfaces, and self-service paths.
• Communicate clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Product, Program Management, and Security.

Job description

Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join our Internal Platform Team (IPT) and shape the cloud and delivery foundations behind NodeZero. You will lead cross-team initiatives, define platform direction, and improve developer workflows with secure, reliable, and self-service capabilities.

You are a hands-on technical leader with 8+ years in platform engineering, deep AWS and Kubernetes experience, and a track record of building scalable automation with Terraform or Crossplane.