[Hiring] Senior Platform Infrastructure Software Engineer @Alkira

Role Description

Alkira is transforming networking through its Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) platform, enabling enterprises to build and operate global cloud networks with simplicity, scale, and agility. We are seeking a Senior Platform Infrastructure Software Engineer to own the foundational layer every other engineering team at Alkira depends on, including Platform Services.

Platform Infrastructure does not own customer-facing features. We build the primitives other engineering teams need in order to work at all:

• The global Kubernetes cluster footprint
• The internal cluster running our CI/CD runners and build platforms
• The shared infrastructure teams consume (databases, object storage, container registries)
• The lifecycle of the shared services everything else is built on

Our customers are engineers, and the output is code, Terraform configuration/modules, Go and Python tooling, cluster and service automation. You will own complex projects, drive architectural decisions, and set the standards other engineers work within.

Responsibilities

• Own the global Kubernetes cluster footprint across regions and cloud providers: provisioning, upgrades, multi-tenancy, resource and network policy, and failure isolation.
• Own the internal cluster running CI/CD runners and build platforms: capacity, isolation, scaling, and the build performance every team feels daily.
• Own the shared infrastructure other teams consume - managed databases, object storage buckets, container registries, and build platforms including provisioning paths, access model, and cost.
• Own the full lifecycle of shared platform services such as internal PKI, vaults, Kubernetes operators.
• Own disaster recovery for the platform: backup and restore, replication and failover design, documented RTO and RPO targets, and regular DR exercises that prove recovery works.
• Design and publish reusable Terraform/OpenTofu modules that let other teams deliver their own infrastructure faster, with correctness and policy built in rather than reviewed in.
• Treat adoption by other teams as the measure of whether a module succeeded.
• Own the observability stack and set the standard other teams instrument against.
• Build production tooling in Go or Python. A significant share of this role is software engineering, not configuration.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design review, and technical guidance.
• Drive down cost and eliminate drift: orphaned resources, stale state, pipelines outliving the services they built.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for the Platform Infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of professional experience in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or SRE engineering, including production ownership.
• Deep production Kubernetes experience operating clusters, not only deploying to them.
• Strong Terraform or OpenTofu experience at scale: module design intended for other teams to consume, state management, and policy-as-code.
• Strong programming ability in Go, Python, or a comparable language.
• Experience running stateful shared services/infrastructure in production (message broker, databases, certificate authority, etc.) or comparable.
• Deep Linux fundamentals: process and resource behavior, and system-level debugging under load.
• Understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, load balancing, and service-to-service communication.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider and the ability to work across others.
• Sound judgment about blast radius, and the discipline to make risky changes reversible.
• Strong technical judgment, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills.

Preferred

• Experience on an internal platform or developer platform team, where the users were other engineers.
• Experience with Scalr or other IaC platforms, including policy-as-code with OPA.
• GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux; Helm, Kustomize, or operator development.
• Managing self-hosted CI runners.
• Deep understanding of Prometheus/Thanos or equivalent, including writing exporters and instrumentation standards.
• Experience with observability platforms, telemetry systems, logging, distributed tracing, and monitoring architectures.
• Experience building highly available, multi-tenant SaaS platforms operating at significant scale.
• Proven ability to influence engineering strategy across organizations and mentor technical talent.
• Carrying production on-call for what you built.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is $84,629 - $155,152 USD. Your actual base salary and level will be determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on the following considerations: job-related knowledge, skills, experience, education, and location. The interview process will include a coding challenge, screening with the hiring manager, and technical interviews.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer-sponsored visa (e.g., H-1B) now or in the future. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position at this time.