Staff Software Engineer, DevOps

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

📋 Description

• Set the technical direction for the construction, operation, and management of Slate's infrastructure.

• Design and implement a hybrid Kubernetes platform utilizing Amazon EKS as well as self-managed clusters on virtualized infrastructure.

• Take ownership of the reference architecture pertaining to cluster provisioning, multi-cluster management, networking, identity, secrets, storage, and upgrades.

• Advance the multi-account AWS environment, encompassing governance, guardrails, IAM, networking, and DNS for connecting cloud sites.

• Determine where workloads will be hosted and establish their connectivity.

• Create on-call rotation schedules, define SLOs, manage error budgets, set alerting standards, oversee incident response, and conduct blameless post-mortems.

• Develop observability across metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic checks.

• Collaborate with Digital, Data Engineering, Manufacturing Systems, and enterprise application teams.

• Provide CI/CD templates, deployment patterns, reusable infrastructure libraries, and self-service environments.

• Shape platform support for manufacturing, plant-floor workloads, data pipelines, and AI/agentic workloads.

• Implement least-privilege access, policy guardrails, secrets management, and software supply chain controls.

• Oversee cloud cost visibility and discipline through tagging, right-sizing, and commitment planning.

• Write production infrastructure and code on a weekly basis.

• Lead design reviews, mentor engineers, and create documentation and runbooks.

• Participate in the on-call rotation.

⛳️ Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, site reliability, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with several years dedicated to setting the technical direction for production platforms.

• Extensive practical experience in designing and operating production AWS environments across multiple accounts, including governance for multi-account setups, identity and access management, VPC networking, hybrid connectivity, DNS, EKS, containers, serverless, and managed data services.

• Proven ability to run Kubernetes in production on EKS and self-managed clusters built on VMs or bare metal, covering cluster lifecycle management, CNI networking, ingress, storage, RBAC, and upgrades.

• Strong expertise in infrastructure as code; AWS CDK is highly preferred.

• Proficient in Python programming.

• Capable of reading, understanding, and making targeted modifications to TypeScript.

• Experience in building delivery pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tools.

• Familiarity with deploying to Kubernetes utilizing GitOps tools such as Argo CD or Flux, Helm, and Kustomize.

• Proven track record of establishing SLOs, observability practices, incident management, and on-call procedures, along with participation in on-call duties.

• Strong understanding of networking within cloud and on-premises environments, including routing, VPN, DNS, load balancing, certificates, and firewalls.

• Ability to influence architectural decisions across teams without direct authority, craft clear design documentation, and align stakeholders effectively.

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, resource-limited startup environment.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States on a permanent basis.

• AWS Professional or Specialty certification is advantageous.

• Experience with Rancher or a similar multi-cluster management platform is highly desirable.

• Familiarity with manufacturing, industrial, or OT environments is a plus.

• Experience with running GPU, machine learning, or AI and agentic workloads on Kubernetes is beneficial.

• Knowledge of enterprise virtualization platforms like VMware is a plus.

• Experience with policy as code, service mesh, or GitHub Enterprise administration is a nice-to-have.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical insurance

• Dental insurance

• Vision insurance

• Life insurance

• Disability insurance

• Vacation

• 401k

• Equity program eligibility

• Discretionary annual incentive program eligibility