Senior Platform Engineer

Platform9 Systems•San Jose, CA

4d•$150,000 - $180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer who treats cloud spend as a first-class engineering concern alongside reliability and performance. You’ll design, operate, and continuously improve our cloud infrastructure — and you’ll own the FinOps discipline that keeps it cost-efficient at scale. Day to day, that means partnering with engineering, SRE and sales to build cost visibility, right-size resources, optimize commitment strategies, and automate everything from provisioning to deployment. You’ll also be a key escalation point for production incidents and a force multiplier for the broader engineering org through tooling and process improvements.

Requirements

5+ years in a DevOps or SRE role with deep experience in cloud infrastructure and operations.
Demonstrated experience with FinOps principles — commitment management, rightsizing, waste reduction, cost allocation, and translating infrastructure decisions into financial impact for non-technical stakeholders.
Extensive Kubernetes experience: cluster administration, deployment strategies, and production troubleshooting.
Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar).
Strong scripting skills in Python or equivalent; strong systems programming in Go or equivalent.
Solid configuration management experience with Salt, Chef, or similar.
Hands-on experience with observability tooling: Prometheus, Cortex, Grafana, Loki.
Familiarity with CI/CD tools and best practices.
Strong Linux administration and debugging skills.
Excellent communication skills — you can explain an infrastructure trade-off or a cost anomaly to an engineer and a finance lead in the same conversation.
Proven incident management experience.

Nice To Haves

OpenStack experience is a plus, not a hard requirement.
EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) experience.
Experience managing on-premise infrastructure.
FinOps Foundation certification (FOCP) or equivalent.
Experience with cloud cost management platforms (Archera, CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer).
Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and AI-powered observability tools.
Experience in a fast-paced startup environment.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain cloud infrastructure across multiple hyperscalers (primarily AWS), including Kubernetes clusters, OpenStack environments, and supporting services.
Own cloud cost optimization end-to-end: analyze spend, eliminate waste, right-size resources, and manage commitment strategies (Reserved Instances, Savings Plans) to reduce total infrastructure cost.
Establish and evolve FinOps practices across the org — cost allocation, chargeback/showback models, tagging policies, and spend forecasting — so engineering teams can make financially informed infrastructure decisions.
Automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments using Terraform, Flux, and similar tools.
Build and maintain observability for both system health and cost efficiency using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and related tools; surface spending trends to engineering and leadership through clear dashboards and regular reporting.
Develop internal tooling and scripts that reduce toil and improve operational leverage.
Collaborate with engineering teams to design and maintain CI/CD pipelines.
Participate in on-call rotation and serve as a senior escalation point for infrastructure, application, and performance incidents.
Stay current on trends in cloud computing, DevOps, and cloud financial management, and bring relevant ideas back to the team.