Senior Cloud Engineer

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As a Senior Cloud Engineer, you'll be at the center of how we design, deploy, and evolve our cloud infrastructure. You'll work closely with engineering, platform, and security teams to define patterns that scale — and make it genuinely easy for developers to do the right thing. You'll codify best practices, champion automation, and bring a modern, opinionated perspective on how cloud-native infrastructure should work. This isn't a "keep the lights on" role. You'll be architecting systems, writing the playbooks others follow, and pushing us toward a more intelligent, automated infrastructure future.

Requirements

Deep hands-on experience with GCP (strongly preferred), AWS, or Azure — you've run production workloads at scale and know where the bodies are buried
Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform or experience with Crossplane or similar policy-driven IaC
Fluency with modern CI/CD tooling — Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar — and a strong GitOps mindset with tools like ArgoCD or Flux
Experience designing container-based and Kubernetes-native architectures
A genuine curiosity about applying AI and automation to infrastructure problems — whether that's smarter alerting, self-healing systems, or LLM-assisted runbooks
Strong communication skills — you can explain a complex architectural decision to an engineer and an executive alike
A collaborative spirit and a bias toward documentation, standards, and shared ownership

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization
Background in platform engineering or developer experience (DX)
Exposure to Cloud Security practices, and experience with IAM, SIEM, scanning, etc.
Experience with service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd)

Responsibilities

Architect and manage scalable, reliable cloud infrastructure across our production and development environments
Define and enforce best practices for cloud deployments, making it easy for teams to ship safely and confidently
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (we use Buildkite) and GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to streamline how code gets from commit to production
Own and evolve our Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, Crossplane, or similar IaC tooling
Drive platform improvements that reduce toil and increase developer velocity
Explore and implement AI-driven approaches to infrastructure automation, observability, and incident response
Partner with engineering teams to design systems that are cloud-native from the ground up
Mentor engineers across the organization on cloud best practices and patterns