Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Description

You would join the infrastructure team at a Series B company with around 145 people from more than 35 countries.

The company's apps are used by over a billion people, handling billions of API requests a month under a 99.999% uptime promise, and a small team runs it all.

The company is backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars and Arthur Ventures. Angels include Dick Costolo (ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub) and Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia).

This year the company is consolidating hosting and rebuilding its data layer on faster, cheaper, self-hosted open-source systems. That work is groundwork. The next step is building the infrastructure every product runs on, including products not yet built, with real SLOs, clear costs, calmer on-call and a platform that speeds up shipping.

This is a software engineering role first. Attitude, ambition and willingness to experiment across the stack count for more than years of Kubernetes or database operations. AI is expected to handle much of the DevOps-heavy work, and you are expected to use it. What it cannot supply is system design judgement, strong fundamentals and good code.

The platform team is small and senior, with none of the support layers of a large organisation. Work moves fast and can get hectic. There is no fixed playbook, you own things end to end, and you will sometimes take on work beyond your title.

The team runs the global platform, shapes the company's margins through hosting decisions, builds internal and customer-facing tools, and makes on-call sustainable. It also makes infrastructure cost visible to every team.

This is probably not a fit if you want to stay a specialist in one layer, want tightly scoped tickets and step-by-step direction, or need a calm, highly predictable environment.

Responsibilities

• Keep the global platform fast and available for customers worldwide, with single-digit millisecond latency and a 99.999% uptime SLA.
• Decide where and how the company runs, and which costs it stops paying.
• Build internal tools that change how engineers deploy and debug, and external tools that show customers their traffic and app health.
• Make on-call sustainable and cut alert noise so each page points to a real fault.
• Give every team a clear view of what it spends on infrastructure and why.
• Define what good looks like for the platform: set latency and uptime SLOs for every product team and choose what to measure, from error rates and delivery times to how healthy customers' apps are.
• Lead design reviews and infrastructure decisions, working with backend, video and moderation engineers on tradeoffs across service boundaries.
• Write the internal services, tooling, docs and AI skills that help engineers ship, deploy and debug faster and make launching a product repeatable.
• Join the on-call rotation and make sure every root cause ends in a lasting fix, not a workaround.
• Weigh cost alongside reliability in every design and give teams the numbers to do the same.

Requirements

• You have built production systems in Go, Python or a similar language, not only configured them. Scripting-only backgrounds do not fit.
• You design distributed systems well, reason about failure modes, capacity and cost, and can explain your choices.
• You have solid grounding in networking, storage and concurrency, and you ask why a system behaves as it does rather than accepting defaults.
• You have owned high-scale production systems and set technical direction through design reviews, RFCs and decisions other engineers build on.
• You experiment. When you meet Kubernetes, a database or a cloud service you have not run, you dig in, use AI to fill the gap and ship.
• You use AI tools every day in your engineering work.
• You treat cost and reliability as engineering problems and can put a number on outcomes you drove.
• You write clearly, since much of the role is docs and standards other teams will follow.
• You are comfortable in a small team, setting direction and reviewing PRs in the same week.
• You would rather try, measure and change course than wait for a perfect plan. You ship and learn quickly, including when things get hectic.
• You are self-directed and comfortable working with a globally distributed team across time zones.
• You want platform work at a scale most engineers never reach, with the autonomy to set direction.
• Production Kubernetes experience, covering cluster architecture, workload design or a migration you led.
• PostgreSQL at scale, ideally self-hosted or on CloudNativePG, with sharding, replication and partitioning tradeoffs.
• Valkey or Redis at scale, ideally on Kubernetes.
• Hands-on AWS and GCP, including multi-cloud setups or migrations between providers.
• Cloud commitment and reservation strategy, such as committed use discounts and savings plans, or a formal FinOps practice.
• SLO design, alert hygiene, and observability built on Prometheus and Grafana.
• Real-time systems experience with WebSockets, WebRTC, streaming or other persistent-connection workloads.
• Open source contributions, or writing and talks on cloud, platform or distributed systems.
• Current stack: Go, gRPC, RocksDB, Python, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, GCP, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elasticsearch and Kibana), Jaeger and Tempo for tracing, Datadog, Redis, Memcached, Claude Code and Cursor.

Conditions

For employees based in the Netherlands: 28 days of paid time off plus Dutch public holidays.

For employees based in the Netherlands: full Dutch statutory leave, with the company topping paternity leave up to 100% pay.

For employees based in the Netherlands: relocation support, visa sponsorship and support with the 30% ruling.

For employees based in the Netherlands: a commute covered by an NS Business Card or a company Swapfiets.

Work from anywhere for up to four weeks a year.

Applicants based in, or relocating to, an office location must follow the local office attendance policy, which covers all terms of employment.

An office in central Amsterdam.

Benefits

• For employees based in the Netherlands: a pension plan.
• For employees based in the Netherlands: a fitness contribution of up to €60 a month toward a gym or sports club membership.
• For employees based in the Netherlands: a learning and development budget.
• For employees based in the Netherlands: catered team lunches in the office, plus snacks.
• For employees based in the Netherlands: a MacBook Pro and peripherals.
• Conferences and meetups as an attendee or speaker.
• The chance to work on the company's open source SDKs.