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Senior Staff Platform Engineer

Chicago, IL

Why Glassdoor?

When you work for Glassdoor, you help people everywhere get ahead in work and life. That’s because we’re moving fast to become the leading community for workplace conversations. Every day, we foster radical transparency by giving professionals a platform to connect authentically and anonymously. Think real talk with real people — plus company reviews and ratings, salary info, job listings and more. 

Join us as we make worklife better, together.

About the Role:

We are seeking an experienced and driven Senior Staff Platform Engineer to join our dynamic Platform Engineering team. This role will be pivotal in building and enhancing our platform around Kubernetes (K8s), improving our AWS implementation, designing and provisioning cloud infrastructure via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and developing a robust disaster recovery plan in AWS. The Senior Staff Platform Engineer will also play a critical role in strategizing future platform engineering efforts, working closely with the Director of Platform Engineering, the Vice President of Software Engineering and the Platform Engineering team in place.

 

What You'll Do:

  • Platform Development: Design, build, and enhance our platform around K8s/EKS, ensuring high availability, scalability, security and performance.
  • AWS Implementation: Lead efforts to improve our AWS implementation, focusing on the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework - Operational Excellence, Cost Optimization, Sustainability, Performance Efficiency etc.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Design and provision cloud infrastructure using IaC tools like Terraform and Crossplane, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and rapid deployment capabilities.
  • Disaster Recovery: Develop and implement a comprehensive AWS disaster recovery plan to ensure business continuity and data protection.
  • Observability: Implement and maintain observability solutions to monitor system performance, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot issues using tools like DataDog.
  • Cloud FinOps: Manage cloud financial operations to optimize cloud spending, ensure cost efficiency, and provide financial transparency.
  • Collaboration: Work closely with customer engineering teams to further the platform and improve overall user experience.
  • Product Management: Occasionally put on a PM hat to align platform engineering efforts with business goals and customer engineering needs.
  • Technical Leadership: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
  • Best Practices: Define and enforce best practices for managing our infrastructure, focusing on automation, monitoring, and incident response.
  • Future Strategy: Participate in strategic planning for future platform engineering efforts, identifying new technologies and methodologies to enhance our platform capabilities that align with business needs.

What You'll Bring:

  • Experience: 8+ years of experience in Cloud Native Engineering (DevOps | SRE | Platform Engineering) with a strong focus on AWS, Kubernetes, automation and architecture/design. Proven track record of building and maintaining large scale, highly available systems.
  • Technical Skills: Extensive expertise in Kubernetes, IaC, and AWS services such as EKS, S3, SQS, RDS/Aurora, EC2, Lambda, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and VPC. Demonstrated experience in building CI/CD pipelines using GitLab or GitHub and in building health metric dashboards and alerts in monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and DataDog. Proven track record in disaster recovery planning within AWS for large-scale enterprises or in high traffic volume organizations. Strong proficiency in advanced scripting languages like Python or object-oriented programming languages such as Java. Experience with CDNs such as Fastly, Cloudflare and Amazon Cloudfront a plus.
  • Observability Tools: Proficiency in observability tools like DataDog for monitoring and performance analysis.
  • Cloud FinOps: Experience with Cloud FinOps to manage and optimize cloud costs effectively.
  • Collaboration: Excellent communication skills with the ability to work effectively across teams and with stakeholders at all levels, including customer engineering teams.
  • Product Management: Ability to take on product management responsibilities, as needed, to create epics and stories with proper acceptance criteria and requirements.
  • Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects and mentor junior engineers. Strong technical leadership in complex problem solving, diagnostics/troubleshooting and the ability to drive technical decisions.
  • Adaptability: Ability to thrive in a fast paced, dynamic environment. Comfortable with both strategic planning and hands-on execution.
  • Agile Experience: Experience with Agile and Scrum methodologies is a plus.
  • AI Assist Tools: Experience with utilizing AI Assist tools such as SourceGraph's Cody AI or GitHub's Copilot, within a platform engineering organization, is an added plus.
  • Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF): Familiarity with, or a contributor to, CNCF projects such as DAPR, Crossplane, Argo etc. is a plus.
  • Certifications: Cloud certifications such as AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, or FinOps Certified Practitioner are highly desirable.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary range*: $152,000 - $202,000

*Glassdoor base salaries are targeted to the market 75th percentile for technical roles and the 65th percentile for non-technical roles. In other words, 65-75% of comparable organizations in our industry will pay less.

Annual Bonus Target**: 15%

**Bonuses are paid in 6-month intervals, aligning with bi-annual performance reviews

Generous Restricted Stock Units (RSU): 

***Restricted Stock Units (RSU) are awarded at hire and may be refreshed annually. Additionally, as a pay-for-performance company, RSU grant awards are presented bi-annually to exceptional performers.

You can learn more about our compensation philosophy here and see salary ranges for all Glassdoor jobs here.

Health and Wellness: 100% employer-paid premiums for employee medical, dental, vision, life, short and long-term disability, select well-being programs, along with 80% employer-paid premiums for all dependents.

  • Generous paid time off programs for birthing and non-birthing parents are provided, along with paid injury/illness leave and paid family emergency leave.

Coverage begins at the start of employment. After 48 months of continuous employment, 100% of all premiums for you and your dependents can be employer-paid!

Work/Life Balance: Open Paid Time Off policy, in addition to 15-20 paid company holidays/year

Investing in Your Future: 401(k) plan with a company match up to $5,000 per year, subsidized fertility and family planning services, and discounted legal assistance services. 

 

Our Commitments

  • Come as you are: At Glassdoor diversity is not a slogan; it’s a core factor in our success. We welcome your background, experience and ideas because you help us understand and better serve our world. You make us stronger.
  • Grow your career: Glassdoor is small enough for you to see the impact of your contributions, while large enough to offer significant resources and endless opportunities to grow. This is a great place to make a career.
  • Find your people: Ask anyone who works here: it’s the people who make the difference. We are a group of well-rounded humans who support one another and work hard together to bring the Glassdoor mission to life.
  • Discover flexibility: With flexible hours and a where-to-work policy, Glassdoor allows you to take on professional and personal responsibilities — enhancing both productivity and your well-being. 

Glassdoor is committed to equal treatment and opportunity in all aspects of recruitment, selection and employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, age, sex, marital status, physical or mental disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, veteran or military status or any other category protected under the law. Glassdoor is an equal opportunity employer; committed to creating a community of inclusion, and an environment free from discrimination, harassment and retaliation.

Where-to-Work Policy
Being a remote-first company, Glassdoor employees can live anywhere Glassdoor is a registered company. Requests to move must be approved by an employee’s manager and the People team. While we will try our best to support relocation requests, some requests may not be approved due to various tax, legal, or other restrictions.

Enjoy Remote and Explore: Employees authorized to work in their current location may Work Away for up to a total of 30 (thirty) working days in a calendar year without permanent relocation and compensation change. Employees on visas may work Work Away for up to a total of 20 (twenty) working days in a calendar year without permanent relocation and compensation change. The amount of time and location for Work Away must be approved by the employee’s manager and People Operations team at least two (2) weeks in advance of travel.

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