Staff Engineer, Core – MLOps

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

📋 Description

• Design and enhance the control plane, encompassing service registry, schema registry, SLO enforcement, and CLI tools.

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

• Take ownership of the multi-language service chassis and golden path, including Java and Python client libraries, workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines.

• Define inter-service contracts using gRPC and Protocol Buffers, along with API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution guidelines.

• Manage the platform substrate across Kubernetes, Terraform, ingress infrastructure, Kafka, billing pipelines, Valkey, and database modernization projects.

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

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

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

• Mentor engineers across various teams, review system proposals, and promote engineering best practices.

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

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Proven history of creating internal platforms or core libraries that are widely utilized by engineering teams.

• Expertise in Java, particularly with reactive frameworks like Vert.x or Netty.

• Strong proficiency in Python.

• Extensive experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers.

• Background in managing schema evolution and ensuring backward compatibility in mission-critical settings.

• Practical experience with Kubernetes in production environments at scale.

• Familiarity with Terraform and event streaming technologies such as Kafka.

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

• Demonstrated success in defining SLOs/SLIs, analyzing blast radius, and building fault-tolerant systems grounded in stringent service contracts.

• Excellent technical writing abilities.

• Strong interpersonal and written communication skills suited for a globally distributed, remote-first workplace.

• Experience with Java 21, Helm, CircleCI, OCI, GCP, Hetzner, Servers.com, Confluent Kafka, BigQuery, Valkey, MySQL/PostgreSQL, HBase, Google Pub/Sub, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry.

• Bonus: familiarity with Temporal, DBOS, model serving, performance monitoring, drift detection, SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, Envoy, CLIs, SDKs, project generators, web scraping/crawling, or contributions to open-source projects.

🏝️ Benefits

• Freedom and flexibility to work from your optimal location.

• Flexible working hours.

• Opportunities to attend conferences and connect with team members worldwide.

• Engage with cutting-edge open source technologies and tools.

• A remote-first culture.

• Continuous innovation and challenging technical tasks.

• A global community fostering collaboration with distributed systems engineers and data specialists across the globe.