Staff Engineer, Core & MLOps (Remote)

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

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,