Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps)

Lever, Inc.; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 900,000 - 1,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Remote-first culture

Flexible working hours

Open-source exposure

Global collaboration

Conference opportunities

Autonomy and trust

Cross-team influence

Job summary

Lever, Inc. is seeking a Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) based in South Africa. You will shape foundational infrastructure powering large-scale web data products and distributed teams.

Work across Kubernetes, Kafka, Java, Python, gRPC, and multi-cloud to tackle complex distributed systems at production scale. You will establish engineering standards, reliability practices, and platform-wide contracts, combining hands-on architecture with leadership and mentoring in a globally distributed,

Qualifications

• 10+ years building scalable distributed backend systems.
• Advanced Java with reactive frameworks (Vert.x/Netty).
• Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers; schema evolution.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve control and context planes; enforce SLOs and routing.
• Own service chassis and gateways, maintain multi-language client libraries and pipelines.
• Define inter-service contracts, include gRPC definitions and API gateway policies.
• Operate and improve platform infrastructure: Kubernetes, Terraform, Kafka, and DB modernization.
• Lead architectural strategy via RFDs covering workflow orchestration, multi-cluster routing, and failover.
• Establish reliability practices: SLOs/SLIs, fault tolerance, automated canaries.
• Mentor engineers across squads; drive reliable software development practices.

Skills

Advanced Java

Python proficiency

gRPC & Protocol Buffers

Kubernetes at scale

Terraform

Reliability engineering

Technical writing

Remote collaboration

MLOps

Developer tooling

Tools

Helm

Kafka

Confluent Kafka

API gateway

Istio/Envoy

Job description

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) based in South Africa.

This role offers the opportunity to shape foundational infrastructure powering large-scale web data products and distributed engineering teams. You’ll own the architecture of core control and context planes that enable services and AI-driven workflows to operate reliably and efficiently. Working across Kubernetes, Kafka, Java, Python, gRPC, and multi-cloud infrastructure, you’ll tackle complex distributed systems challenges at production scale. You’ll establish engineering standards, reliability practices, and service contracts that influence multiple product squads. The role combines hands‑on architecture with technical leadership, mentoring, and cross-functional alignment. In a globally distributed, remote‑first environment, you’ll have significant autonomy to solve challenging infrastructure problems and influence long-term platform strategy.

Accountabilities:

• Architect and evolve the control and context planes, advancing service and schema registries, SLO enforcement, health-aware routing, automated canary releases, and operational feedback loops.


• Own the service chassis and golden path, maintaining and improving multi-language Java and Python client libraries, standardized workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines.


• Define and govern inter-service contracts, including gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution standards.


• Operate and improve the core platform infrastructure across Kubernetes, Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx, Confluent Kafka, real-time billing pipelines, Valkey, and database modernization initiatives.


• Lead architectural strategy through Requests for Discussion (RFDs) covering workflow orchestration, gateway orchestration, multi-cluster routing, automated failover, and other critical platform initiatives.


• Establish reliability engineering practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, fault isolation, and automated weighted canary deployments.


• Participate in shared infrastructure on‑call rotations, lead incident post‑mortems, and convert operational insights into platform improvements.


• Mentor engineers across multiple squads, review architectural proposals, and establish engineering practices that make reliable software development more consistent and efficient.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems, with a strong track record of creating internal platforms or core libraries adopted across engineering organizations.


• Advanced Java expertise, including reactive frameworks such as Vert.x or Netty, combined with strong Python proficiency.


• Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers, including schema evolution and backward compatibility in mission‑critical systems.


• Hands‑on production experience with Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and event‑streaming platforms such as Kafka.


• Experience designing automated telemetry pipelines, materialized views, feature stores, or other feedback systems that use production data to dynamically improve system behavior.


• Strong reliability engineering background, including SLO/SLI definition, blast‑radius analysis, fault tolerance, and rigorous service contracts.


• Exceptional technical writing skills and the ability to communicate complex architectural concepts clearly while driving alignment across teams.


• Strong written and interpersonal communication skills suited to a globally distributed, remote‑first environment.


• A curious, continuous‑learning mindset with an interest in evaluating new technologies, architectures, and engineering approaches.


• Experience with Temporal, DBOS, or similar durable execution platforms is a plus.


• MLOps experience, including model serving, performance monitoring, or production drift detection, is advantageous.


• Familiarity with zero‑trust networking and service meshes such as SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, or Envoy is beneficial.


• Experience building developer tooling such as CLIs, SDKs, or project generators is a plus.


• Experience with large‑scale web scraping or crawling, or contributions to distributed‑systems and data‑extraction open‑source projects, is advantageous.

Benefits:

• Fully remote, remote‑first working environment with flexible working hours.


• Freedom and flexibility to work from the location where you are most productive.


• Opportunity to work on core infrastructure supporting large‑scale web data pipelines and distributed systems.


• Exposure to cutting‑edge open‑source technologies, tools, and evolving AI and web data infrastructure.


• Opportunities to attend conferences and connect with colleagues across the globe.


• Collaboration with a diverse, multicultural, and globally distributed engineering community.


• High level of autonomy and organizational trust.


• Opportunities to influence platform architecture, engineering standards, and technical strategy across multiple teams.

We appreciate your interest and wish you the best!

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