Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering – Operational Health

Role Overview

• Conduct comprehensive audits of infrastructure, deployment processes, incident patterns, and on-call burden
• Identify foundational issues causing operational pain: fragile systems, deployment friction, poor observability, and architectural weaknesses
• Establish baseline metrics for system health and operational efficiency
• Prioritize improvements systematically based on impact to on-call burden and reliability
• Design and implement solutions that address the root causes of incidents
• Eliminate single points of failure in critical paths
• Implement patterns for graceful degradation and rapid recovery
• Build comprehensive observability, logging, metrics, and tracing infrastructure
• Identify and automate repetitive manual work that burdens operational staff
• Establish organizational standards and expectations for reliability
• Design and maintain runbooks, playbooks, and incident response processes
• Create feedback loops from incidents to systemic improvements
• Support CI/CD pipelines that enable safe, frequent deployments
• Develop operational tooling (dashboards, alerts, automation)
• Reduce friction in how engineers interact with infrastructure and deploy code
• Scale infrastructure responsibly as the organization grows
• Optimize platform reliability, performance, and cost through capacity planning, workload tuning, and architectural tradeoffs
• Own the technical strategy and roadmap for infrastructure, reliability, and operational posture
• Mentor engineers across the organization on operational thinking and reliability engineering
• Lead architecture reviews and establish technical standards
• Build organizational practices and knowledge that outlast any single engineer

Requirements

• 5–8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise in infrastructure, operations, reliability engineering, or SRE
• Staff-level technical depth with ownership of significant platform decisions at scale
• Proven ability to manage complex trade-offs and defend technical direction
• Experience carrying the pager; understanding of on-call burden from lived experience
• Demonstrated pattern recognition; ability to design systemic solutions rather than one-off fixes
• Expert-level infrastructure-as-code (Terraform); comfortable with complex multi-environment deployments
• Docker and container orchestration expertise (Kubernetes or similar); experience designing or improving deployment pipelines
• Deep familiarity with Node.js and TypeScript in production environments
• Substantial AWS experience (EC2, RDS, Lambda, CloudWatch, VPC, load balancers, auto-scaling, managed services)
• Understanding of AWS architecture patterns and cost optimization
• Proficiency in scripting/automation languages (Python, Go, Bash); ability to write maintainable, scalable automation
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, metrics collection, and distributed tracing
• Ability to instrument systems for visibility and rapid diagnosis
• Experience optimizing systems at scale and handling growth challenges
• Strategic thinking about capacity planning, resource requirements, and cost management
• Understanding of relational databases, including performance considerations and optimization
• Knowledge of networking concepts, caching patterns, and load balancing strategies
• Understanding of distributed systems concepts and failure modes
• Comfortable with AI/LLM tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.) and uses them effectively in day-to-day work
• Ability to validate AI/LLM output and use it as a jump-off point (ask better questions, iterate, and verify with real evidence)
• Experience experimenting with AI for infrastructure automation, code generation, and problem-solving
• Proactive thinking about how AI can accelerate platform engineering work
• Experience leading the design of resilient systems and conducting architecture reviews
• Proven ability to elevate other engineers' capabilities and establish technical standards
• Strong communication skills; able to explain technical complexity to diverse audiences
• Ability to write clear ADRs and technical documentation that guides future decisions
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction without formal authority

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Distributed Systems
• Docker
• EC2
• JavaScript
• Kubernetes
• Node.js
• Python
• Terraform
• TypeScript
• Go

Benefits

• Work with a talented but humble team
• Competitive compensation and equity
• Weekly paid family meal
• 401k, medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO Policy
• 15.5 company-paid holidays including Juneteenth, MLK Day and a 1-week company shut down
• To support remote work conditions, AudioEye provides each employee a one-time stipend of $300