Senior Staff Software Developer, Core Infrastructure

Robinhood•Toronto, ON

2h•CA$234,000 - CA$275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Robinhood is building an elite team to apply frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. The Core Infrastructure team is responsible for building and evolving the foundational platform that all Robinhood engineering teams build on. This includes owning the systems, primitives, and developer-facing abstractions that power 24/7 trading, crypto, and global expansion. The team treats infrastructure as a product: reliable, fast to provision, and invisible to the teams above it. As a Senior Staff Software Developer on Core Infrastructure, you will own the architectural evolution of service mesh and connectivity, compute platform, and infrastructure provisioning. Your decisions will directly shape engineering velocity, operational reliability, and Robinhood's ability to expand to new regions and markets. This is an opportunity to redesign the foundation before complexity becomes permanent. This role is based in our Toronto, ON office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week. Robinhood believes in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community.

Requirements

Deep, hands-on expertise with Kubernetes internals — API server, controller reconciliation, etcd watch propagation, scheduler mechanics, and admission control
Deep working knowledge of Istio and/or Envoy at the source code level — including the xDS API as a protocol; experience debugging at the control-plane/data-plane boundary
HTTP/2 and gRPC wire-level knowledge — connection management, flow control, stream multiplexing, and observability
Terraform at architectural scale — module design patterns, provider internals, remote state management, and multi-region provisioning
Production Go or Python for infrastructure tooling; strong fundamentals in writing well-structured, tested, operationally sound code
Proven ability to drive cross-functional architectural change across large or complex engineering organizations — influencing without authority and shipping durable decisions

Responsibilities

Own service mesh architecture end-to-end — standardize and evolve Robinhood's Istio and Envoy deployment, eliminate deprecated communication patterns, and build the networking foundation for multi-region operation
Drive Kubernetes compute platform evolution — define the long-term direction for cluster lifecycle, scheduling strategy, control plane architecture, and multi-region resiliency across Robinhood's entire compute fleet
Redesign infrastructure provisioning — transform Terraform from a collection of ad-hoc configurations into a scalable, self-service platform capability that enables rapid region provisioning and developer autonomy
Operate with source-level depth — diagnose and resolve issues at the Kubernetes API machinery, etcd, Envoy xDS, and Terraform provider layer, and contribute upstream where it serves the platform
Define technical direction across teams — produce architecture proposals, lead design reviews, and drive cross-functional alignment on infrastructure decisions that affect every engineering organization at Robinhood