Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal

Description

The role sits in the Data Platform Engineering group and is an IC5 senior staff position for a hands-on technical lead.

You will lead the design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services on Kubernetes, covering Postgres, queueing and streaming, and key-value stores, and act as the technical anchor for their availability, resilience and operating model.

These services run across a large global fleet and many product teams depend on them, so you will own them from design through production.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of managed Postgres, queueing and streaming, and key-value or cache services running on Kubernetes across the fleet.
• Turn vague problems, such as offering highly available Postgres to every cluster or keeping the queueing tier running through a zone loss, into concrete designs with explicit availability, durability and cost targets.
• Define high availability, failover, disaster recovery and multi-region architecture for the services you own.
• Build Kubernetes-native automation, such as operators, controllers, CRDs and self-service APIs, that provisions, scales, upgrades and fails over these services without manual work.
• Work with principal and distinguished engineers to align your designs with the wider platform architecture and standards.
• Work with product teams to agree consumption contracts, tenancy models and SLOs for shared services.
• Identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution, with a focus on reliability, scalability and operability, including failure-mode analysis, game days and post-incident reviews for stateful systems.
• Spend significant time hands-on, designing, coding and reviewing core systems such as operators, controllers, infrastructure automation and platform services.
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers and raise the bar through code reviews, design feedback and pairing, especially on distributed-systems and data-service design.

Requirements

• Experience using AI in engineering or platform work, such as AI-powered tooling, automating operations, building agentic systems for fleet visibility, or assessing how AI changes the way infrastructure is built and run.
• 12+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 8+ years with a Master's, or 5+ years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years building production software, including solid experience running distributed systems and stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• A record of leading design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used widely by other teams, such as a relational database (Postgres or similar), a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ or similar), or a key-value or cache service (Redis, Valkey, etcd or similar), including its high availability, failover and operating model.
• Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling, including replication topologies, leader election, quorum and consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup, restore and point-in-time recovery, and designing to explicit RPO and RTO and durability targets.
• Strong system design skills: reasoning about consistency models, partitioning, rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor mitigation, and explaining trade-offs to engineers and stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure or GCP), including its core compute, networking, storage and IAM primitives.
• Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes, including stateful primitives (StatefulSets, CSI and persistent storage, PDBs, topology spread), CI/CD and GitOps delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong Go programming skills, or strong systems-language skills and a willingness to work mainly in Go.
• It helps if you have experience building or extending Kubernetes operators for stateful systems, such as CloudNativePG, Zalando or Crunchy Postgres operators, Strimzi, or Redis and Valkey operators, and a view on when to adopt existing operators versus build your own.
• It helps if you have deep expertise in one target system: Postgres internals (WAL, streaming and logical replication, vacuum, PgBouncer or PgCat pooling, major-version upgrades), Kafka or NATS (partitioning, ISR and replication, exactly-once semantics, consumer scaling), or Redis and Valkey (cluster mode, persistence, eviction, hot-key handling).
• It helps if you have run data services across multiple regions or clusters, including cross-region replication, failover orchestration and DR testing.
• It helps if you have done zero-downtime upgrades, schema or data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
• It helps if you have observability and SLOs for stateful systems (replication lag, saturation, tail latency, error budgets) and capacity and cost management for shared infrastructure.
• It helps if you have designed multi-tenancy with quotas, isolation, chargeback or showback, and self-service provisioning through APIs or CRDs.
• It helps if you have worked with container networking (CNI) or service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS and secrets management for data services.
• It helps if you have worked with managed Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), managed data services (RDS or Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.

Conditions

This is a flexible hybrid role: you are expected in a company office two days per week.

Offices are in San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; and Kirkland, WA.

The role includes support for the company's US regulated markets.

Base pay is $149,800 - $262,200, plus equity where applicable, variable or incentive pay, and benefits. The posted base is a guideline; actual total pay depends on qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location, and pay is set by the geographic location of the role and may change.

Work personas (flexible, remote or required in office) are assigned by the nature of the work and work location. The company may use a third-party service to measure the distance between your home and the nearest office to confirm eligibility.

The company states that sales positions generally include an On Target Earnings incentive structure.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.