Staff Platform Engineer

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Staff Platform Engineer with a rare combination: deep cloud architecture expertise paired with product development experience or a strongly product-minded approach to infrastructure. You'll shape Gladly's infrastructure strategy, set architectural direction, and drive technical decisions that have company-wide impact.

You understand infrastructure from both sides—you've either built product features yourself or worked so closely with product teams that you anticipate their needs and design platforms they love to use. You think about infrastructure as a product, with engineering teams as your customers.

You'll lead complex initiatives spanning 4+ engineers and multiple quarters, architect multi-cloud systems that enable AI-powered products serving millions of daily conversations, and mentor engineers to elevate the entire team. You'll translate business strategy into platform capabilities and establish the engineering practices that become Gladly standards.

What You'll Do on the Team

• Architect and evolve multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) that supports AI workloads, scales with aggressive growth, and optimizes for cost, reliability, and security
• Drive technical strategy and roadmap for platform capabilities—lead architectural decisions, evaluate trade-offs, build consensus with stakeholders, and own outcomes
• Lead complex initiatives spanning 4+ engineers and multiple quarters, from design through delivery
• Partner with product engineering to anticipate infrastructure needs and co-design solutions that improve engineering velocity
• Mentor engineers and establish best practices across the organization through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and influencing how Gladly builds systems
• Build foundational platform services including Kubernetes infrastructure, observability platforms, CI/CD systems, and distributed systems components

A Few Projects You Could Be Working On

• Architecting multi-region infrastructure strategies that deliver 99.9% uptime for AI-powered customer conversations handling millions of interactions daily
• Designing platform capabilities that enable product teams to deploy and experiment with AI models as easily as traditional features
• Leading infrastructure modernization initiatives that eliminate technical debt while maintaining zero-downtime for customer-facing services
• Building observability and cost visibility platforms that give teams actionable insights into system health and resource utilization
• Evaluating and integrating next-generation technologies (service mesh, AI infrastructure, edge computing) that will power Gladly's future

What You'll Bring to the Team

• 8+ years of platform/infrastructure/DevOps engineering experience with a track record of designing and operating production systems at significant scale
• Product development experience or product-minded approach—you've built product features or worked closely with product teams to understand their challenges and translate them into platform capabilities
• Expert cloud architecture skills (AWS strongly preferred)—you've designed multi-region, highly available systems that scaled with business growth
• Ability to lead complex, ambiguous initiatives—you take fuzzy problems, define solutions, build consensus, and drive execution across multiple quarters with minimal direction
• Technical leadership and mentorship—you've led initiatives spanning 4+ people, coached engineers, influenced culture, and established best practices
• Systems thinking and architectural mastery—you see the big picture, understand operational implications, and make sound trade-offs between agility, cost, performance, and security
• Strong communication and stakeholder management—you explain complex technical decisions to business leaders, influence without authority, and build collaborative relationships

Nice to have:

• Kubernetes expertise in production environments at scale
• Software development proficiency in Go, Python, or Node.js
• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure requirements and scaling patterns
• Track record of building internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure capabilities

Compensation:

$156,000 to $215,000 per annum base salary + equity + benefits

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including geographic location as well as candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.