Staff Engineer, Core, MLOps

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Poland.

📋 Description

• Design and enhance the control plane, which includes service registry, schema registry, SLO enforcement, and CLI tooling.

• Develop and construct the context plane to consolidate operational signals and establish automated feedback loops for self-healing maintenance.

• Sustain and improve Java and Python client libraries, workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines.

• Create gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, manage API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution guidelines.

• Manage the platform infrastructure across Kubernetes, Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx ingresses, Confluent Kafka, event-billing pipelines, Valkey, and database modernization efforts.

• Lead Requests for Discussion on workflow orchestration, gateway orchestration, multi-cluster routing, and automated failover strategies.

• Define SLOs and error budgets, implement health-aware traffic isolation, and facilitate automated weighted canary deployments.

• Engage in the shared infrastructure on-call rotation and spearhead incident post-mortems.

• Mentor engineers from various squads, evaluate system proposals, and promote engineering best practices.

• Act as the technical lead for the Core & MLOps squad, influencing architecture and release velocity in adjacent squads.

• Develop the infrastructure supporting Zyte’s web data extraction platform along with its Java and Python microservices.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in building scalable distributed backend systems.

• Demonstrated history of creating internal platforms or core libraries widely utilized by engineering teams.

• Proficiency in Java, including reactive frameworks such as Vert.x or Netty.

• Strong skills in Python.

• Extensive experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers.

• Experience in managing schema evolution and ensuring backward compatibility in critical environments.

• Practical hands-on expertise with Kubernetes at scale.

• Familiarity with Terraform and event streaming using Kafka.

• Experience in designing automated telemetry pipelines, materialized views, or feature stores that adapt system behavior based on production data.

• Proven ability to define SLOs/SLIs, analyze blast radius, and design fault-tolerant systems around stringent service contracts.

• Outstanding technical writing abilities.

• Strong interpersonal and written communication skills suitable for a globally distributed, remote-first work environment.

• Enthusiasm for continuous learning and exploring new tools, architectures, and methodologies.

• Experience with Java 21 and Python.

• Familiarity with Helm and CircleCI.

• Experience with multi-cloud infrastructure, including OCI and GCP, as well as data centers like Hetzner and Servers.com.

• Knowledge of Confluent Kafka, BigQuery, Valkey, MySQL/PostgreSQL, HBase, or Google Pub/Sub.

• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or OpenTelemetry.

• Bonus: experience with Temporal, DBOS, or similar workflow platforms.

• Bonus: MLOps experience in model serving, performance monitoring, and drift detection.

• Bonus: familiarity with SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, or Envoy.

• Bonus: a record of developing CLIs, SDKs, or project generators.

• Bonus: familiarity with large-scale web data extraction.

• Bonus: contributions to open-source projects in distributed systems or data extraction.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexibility and freedom to work from locations that suit you best.

• Adjustable working hours.

• Opportunities to attend conferences.

• Connect with team members from around the world.

• Work with leading-edge open source technologies and tools.

• Embrace a remote-first culture.

• High level of organizational trust.