Software Development Engineer Staff

Equinix • Redwood City, CA

19h • $142,000 - $212,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective. Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work. We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own the inner loop of our developer platform — the scaffolding, environment bootstrap, and shared library systems that determine how fast and confidently engineers go from idea to first commit. This role is foundational: the composable scaffolding engine, declarative service schemas, and template lifecycle systems you build will directly determine whether developers experience a golden path or a maze of tribal knowledge and configuration drift. You will design and ship opinionated, production-grade tooling that generates repositories, CI pipelines, baseline tests, and infrastructure hooks from a single schema declaration — and maintain those templates safely over time as the platform evolves. This is not a role for someone who has used golden-path systems; it's for someone who has built and operated them at scale.

Requirements

• Production experience building developer platform tooling — repo generators, CI/CD scaffolding frameworks, devcontainer or ephemeral environment automation — not just consuming them.
• Strong in Go or Python; deep fluency with GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipeline generation and automation.
• Hands-on Terraform experience for infrastructure generation and self-service provisioning patterns.
• Experience with OPA or equivalent policy-as-code engines integrated into build and deploy workflows.
• Strong understanding of container runtimes, base image management, and environment parity patterns (devcontainers, Docker Compose, Kubernetes).
• Experience designing and maintaining template lifecycle systems: versioning, migration paths, backward compatibility, rollback safety.
• Familiarity with schema validation tooling and CLI-first developer experience design.
• Comfortable working across the stack from schema design through to CI integration and portal plugin surfaces.
• 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a platform engineering or developer experience role at a mid-to-large engineering organization.
• Has designed and operated opinionated golden-path systems at scale — the kind that hundreds of engineers depend on daily.
• Track record of reducing developer toil through automation, not just documentation or guidelines.
• Strong written communication skills — this role produces tooling that must be self-explanatory, and documentation is part of the deliverable.
• Able to work cross-functionally with security, CI/CD, and application engineering teams to align on standards without creating bottlenecks.

Nice To Haves

• Background from companies with strong platform cultures (e.g., Spotify, Netflix, Stripe, Uber, Airbnb) is strongly preferred.
• Experience with Backstage or similar developer portal frameworks is a plus.
• Familiarity with enterprise compliance requirements (audit trails, change evidence, vulnerability scanning integration) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Composable Scaffolding Engine: Design and build the engine that generates repositories, CI/CD pipelines, baseline tests, configuration, and platform integrations from declarative service schemas with opinionated defaults and extensibility hooks.
• Own the full scaffolding surface: repo generator, CI/CD pipeline generator, config manager, secrets/env var wiring, and integration layer into GitHub and cloud providers.
• Ensure generated scaffolds are immediately functional — wired to CI, observability, and infra hooks from day one, with no blank-page setup required.
• Declarative Service & Workload Schemas: Define and maintain the schema specification that captures application type, runtime, dependencies, testing defaults, and infrastructure intent in a standardized, versioned format.
• Build validation tooling (CLI and CI-integrated) to enforce schema correctness and surface errors early.
• Reduce time-to-first-commit from the current 18–40 day range to under one week.
• Template Lifecycle Management: Build the versioning, validation, and upgrade system that evolves scaffolds over time while preserving backward compatibility for downstream projects.
• Implement three-way merge logic (template old → template new → customized service) with rollback safety and customization detection so teams can adopt template updates without breaking builds.
• Local Dev & Environment Bootstrap: Build and maintain standardized local and ephemeral development environment descriptors (devcontainers, Docker Compose, golden images) with parity validation against CI and target runtimes.
• Implement environment automation: just-in-time provisioning triggered by pull request, configuration injection for secrets and service discovery, and tear-down automation.
• Implement environment health and drift detection to catch "works on my machine" failures before they reach CI.
• Reusable Shared Libraries: Build and maintain versioned shared libraries for cross-cutting concerns — logging, encryption, auto-configuration, trace propagation, and Docker base images — as consumable, consistent building blocks for all application teams.
• Ensure libraries are secure from inception and reduce fragmentation in security posture and reliability across the service ecosystem.

Benefits

• Employee Assistance Program: An Employee Assistance program is available to all employees.
• US Benefits: - Insurance: You may enroll in health, life, disability and voluntary plans that are designed for you and your eligible family members.
• - Retirement: You and Equinix may contribute to a retirement plan to help you plan for your financial future.
• - Paid Time Off (PTO) and Paid Holidays: You will receive an accrued amount of PTO each pay period along with various paid holidays for you to rest and recharge.

What This Job Offers

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