Senior Staff Software Engineer, Core Infrastructure

Robinhood • Bellevue, WA

4h • $264,000 - $310,000 • 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 use. This includes owning systems, primitives, and developer-facing abstractions that support 24/7 trading, crypto, and global expansion. The team treats infrastructure as a product, aiming for reliability, speed, and invisibility to other teams. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Core Infrastructure, you will own the architectural evolution of service mesh and connectivity, compute platform, and infrastructure provisioning. Your decisions will impact engineering velocity, operational reliability, and Robinhood's global expansion capabilities. This is a significant opportunity to redesign the platform's foundation before complexity becomes permanent. The role is based in Bellevue, WA, with a requirement for at least 3 days of in-person attendance per week, emphasizing the value Robinhood places on in-person collaboration for progress, innovation, and 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

Benefits

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career
• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, and equity ownership
• Top tier benefits to fuel your work, including supplemental health insurance, ancillary insurance, and mental health support programs
• Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not
• Lifestyle wallet — a highly flexible employer-paid benefits spending account for expenses beyond traditional benefits such as wellness, childcare, learning, and more
• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, paid volunteer time off, parental leave, and more!
• Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces
• Monthly commuter stipend to help offset in-office commuting costs

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed