Staff Software Engineer - Services Platform

Mercury; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercury in the United States is seeking a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to own the platforms that deploy, operate, and evolve Mercury's services. This is a deeply technical, systems-level role focused on standardizing patterns while guiding a large engineering organization through change.

You’ll define the paved deployment path, evolve the runtime architecture with Kubernetes, and make observability self-service so product engineers can diagnose issues without routing every question through

Qualifications

• Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.
• Own the service-ecosystem strategy including identity, authentication, discovery and communication.
• Create paved deployment paths with defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration and secrets.
• Evolve the service runtime architecture, including Kubernetes, while keeping services healthy.
• Make observability self-service so engineers can debug systems without asking Infra.
• Collaborate with Release Engineering, Security and product teams to enforce compliance and adoption.
• Find high-leverage gaps and ship pragmatic improvements rather than chasing perfect future.
• Establish patterns to scale Mercury's services without proportional complexity.
• Mentor engineers and shape infrastructure thinking.

Responsibilities

• Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.
• Own the strategy for service ecosystem at Mercury including identity, authentication, discovery and communication.
• Work with product stakeholders and Release Engineering to create a paved deployment path with strong defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration, secrets, and operational safety.
• Help evolve Mercury’s service runtime architecture, including our use of Kubernetes, while keeping existing services healthy through the transition.
• Make observability self-service so product engineers can understand and debug their systems without routing every question through Infrastructure.
• Partner closely with Release Engineering, Security, and product engineering teams to create infrastructure that is compliant with financial regulations and useful enough that teams actively want to adopt it.
• Find the highest-leverage gaps in our services ecosystem and ship pragmatic improvements instead of waiting for a perfect future architecture.
• Establish patterns that let Mercury support many more services without multiplying operational complexity at the same rate.
• Mentor engineers and shape infrastructure thinking beyond the systems you directly own.

Skills

Kubernetes

Deployment strategy

Reliability engineering

Mentoring

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

At its height, the Venetian Arsenal could produce ships at a speed that were mostly unmatched in its era. Its advantage was not simply that its craftspeople worked faster. Venice standardized the pieces around them. Parts, processes, and responsibilities became reusable enough that shipbuilding became stamp and repeat, not creating from scratch every time.

Mercury's services ecosystem is reaching a similar transition.

As more of Mercury moves beyond our core Haskell monolith, product teams are increasingly building and operating independent services. That gives teams more flexibility, but it also creates a new class of infrastructure problems. How should services authenticate to each other? How should they be discovered? What does a safe deployment look like? How does an engineer understand whether their service is healthy? And how do we answer those questions once, rather than asking every product team to build its own version?

We’re looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to become a technical owner for Mercury’s services platform.

You’ll help define the paved road for building and running services at Mercury. This is a deeply technical role, but the hardest problems won’t be solved by writing code. You’ll need excellent judgment about what is worth standardizing, what should stay flexible, how quickly we can move, and how to bring a large engineering organization along with you. We see this role as the trailblazer for several more engineers to follow so the foundations and relationships you build across the org will pay off for those who come after!

In this role, you’ll:

• Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.
• Own the strategy for service ecosystem at Mercury including identity, authentication, discovery and communication.
• Work with product stakeholders and Release Engineering to create a paved deployment path with strong defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration, secrets, and operational safety.
• Help evolve Mercury’s service runtime architecture, including our use of Kubernetes, while keeping existing services healthy through the transition.
• Make observability self-service so product engineers can understand and debug their systems without routing every question through Infrastructure.
• Partner closely with Release Engineering, Security, and product engineering teams to create infrastructure that is compliant with financial regulations and useful enough that teams actively want to adopt it.
• Find the highest-leverage gaps in our services ecosystem and ship pragmatic improvements instead of waiting for a perfect future architecture.
• Establish patterns that let Mercury support many more services without multiplying operational complexity at the same rate.
• Mentor engineers and shape infrastructure thinking beyond the systems you directly own.

You should:

• Have deep experience operating Kubernetes in production and strong instincts around deployment architecture, failure modes, and mig