Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal

Description

The company's Data Platform Engineering group is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer at IC5 level. This hands-on technical lead will set the design and delivery direction for shared, multi-tenant platform services: Postgres, queueing and streaming, and key-value stores, all running on Kubernetes.

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

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of managed Postgres, queueing and streaming, and key-value/cache services running on Kubernetes across a large global fleet, from design through production operation.
• Turn vague problems into concrete designs with clear availability, durability and cost targets.
• Define HA, failover, disaster recovery and multi-region architecture for the services you own, along with Kubernetes automation (operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs) that provisions, scales, upgrades and fails over services without manual intervention.
• Work with principal and distinguished engineers to align your work with the wider platform architecture and standards.
• Work with product teams to set consumption contracts, tenancy models and SLOs for shared services.
• Identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution, focusing on reliability, scalability and operability. Lead failure-mode analysis, game days and post-incident reviews for stateful systems.
• Spend significant time coding and reviewing core systems such as operators, controllers, infrastructure automation and platform services.
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers through code reviews, design feedback and pairing, especially on distributed systems and data-service design.

Requirements

• Experience using AI in engineering or platform work, or critically assessing it: AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or 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 operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• A track record of leading design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used widely by other teams: a relational database (Postgres or similar), a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ or similar), or a key-value/cache service (Redis/Valkey, etcd or similar), including its HA, failover and operating model.
• Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling: replication topologies, leader election, quorum and consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup, restore and point-in-time recovery, and designing to explicit RPO/RTO and durability targets.
• Strong system design skills: consistency models, partitioning and rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor mitigation, with the ability to explain trade-offs to engineers and stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure or GCP), including 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 with a willingness to work mainly in Go.
• It also helps if you have experience building or extending Kubernetes operators for stateful systems (such as CloudNativePG, Zalando or Crunchy Postgres operators, Strimzi, Redis/Valkey operators), and a view on when to adopt versus build.
• It also 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/Valkey (cluster mode, persistence, eviction, hot-key handling).
• It also helps if you have run data services across multiple regions or clusters, including cross-region replication, failover orchestration and DR testing.
• It also helps if you have done zero-downtime upgrades, schema or data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
• It also helps if you have built observability and SLOs for stateful systems (replication lag, saturation, tail latency, error budgets), and managed capacity and cost for shared infrastructure.
• It also helps if you have designed multi-tenancy with quotas, isolation, chargeback or showback, and self-service provisioning APIs or CRDs.
• It also helps if you have worked with container networking (CNI) or a service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS and secrets management for data services.
• It also helps if you have used managed Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), managed data services (RDS/Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.

Conditions

Hybrid role: you spend 2 days per week in a company office. Offices are in San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; and Kirkland, WA.

Base pay guideline for this location is $149,800 to $262,200, plus equity when applicable, variable or incentive pay, and benefits. Actual total pay varies with qualifications, skill level, competencies and work location, and the guideline may change based on where the role is located.

Sales roles generally use an On Target Earnings incentive structure.

Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are assigned based on the nature of the work and work location. The company may check the distance from your primary residence to the nearest office with a third-party service.

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.