Senior Staff Software Development Engineer - DevOps

Job Summary: We’re looking for a Senior Staff Platform Engineer to join our Developer Productivity & Platforms group. This role blends traffic engineering (API gateway, CDN, service-to-service routing) with core responsibilities, including automation, observability, reliability engineering, CI/CD workflows, and internal tooling that accelerates developer efficiency.

You’ll own critical systems responsible for managing API traffic — both north-south (external ingress) and east-west (internal service-to-service communication) — across a global, multi-cloud environment. You’ll architect resilient routing systems, edge integrations with CDNs, and observability hooks that ensure everything you build is secure, debuggable, and automated.

This is a hands-on role with high visibility and impact. You’ll work across platform, SRE, and developer experience teams to ensure the infrastructure is reliable, observable, and developer-friendly — from traffic routing to deployments to production operations.

One of your key responsibilities will also be to design and build a unified traffic abstraction layer — a foundational platform that maps backend services deployed across various compute environments to their respective configurations on CDNs (e.g., Akamai, Fastly). This framework will centralize control over routing, metadata inventory, configuration tracking, and automated failover across CDNs. This capability does not currently exist and will be built from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the technical vision and long-term evolution of the API Gateway and traffic platform supporting both north-south (external ingress) and east-west (internal service-to-service) traffic, operating at scale across a multi-cloud environment.
• Architect and drive a unified traffic abstraction layer that decouples backend services from CDN-specific implementations (Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare), enabling centralized policy control, metadata-driven routing, automated multi-CDN failover, and future extensibility.
• Set architectural standards and design patterns for ingress, traffic routing, and API management, influencing multiple teams and ensuring consistency, security, scalability, and reliability across the organization.
• Lead complex, cross-team initiatives spanning networking, platform, SRE, security, and observability teams to deliver resilient, cloud-agnostic ingress solutions that account for varying network topologies, latency characteristics, and failure modes.
• Design and govern CI/CD and GitOps workflows for critical traffic infrastructure, defining best practices for safe deployments, progressive rollouts, automated validation, and rollback strategies across environments.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code maturity using Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes, establishing reusable modules, golden paths, and guardrails that enable teams to deploy and operate traffic components safely and independently.
• Build and evolve foundational tooling and services (primarily in Go or Python) that improve visibility, control, scalability, and operational efficiency of API traffic systems at scale.
• Define observability strategy and standards for ingress and internal traffic systems, including metrics, logs, tracing, and SLOs; partner closely with observability and SRE teams to ensure systems are diagnosable and production-ready by default.
• Act as a technical multiplier by mentoring senior engineers, reviewing high-impact designs, unblocking teams, and raising the overall quality bar for platform engineering and distributed systems practices.
• Anticipate future needs and risks, proactively identifying scaling limits, security gaps, and reliability concerns, and driving strategic investments before they become production issues.

Skills and Attributes to Success:

• Expert-level programming capability in Go or Python, with a track record of designing and delivering production-grade platforms, internal tooling, and services that operate reliably at scale; able to make pragmatic trade-offs between performance, maintainability, and velocity.
• Deep, hands-on experience with API Gateway platforms in large-scale production environments, including ownership of architecture, rollout strategies, failure handling, and long-term evolution of ingress and traffic management systems.
• Strong understanding of CDN architectures and integrations (Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare or similar), including cache strategies, request …