Staff Cloud Platform Engineer
About The Position
The Staff Cloud Platform Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for the design, automation, and operational excellence of the service backbone powering BlackLine’s SaaS products. The role leads the evolution of mission-critical platforms that influence revenue generation and serves as a technical authority shaping architecture across the organization. It calls for expertise in DevOps, containers, event-driven technology, and data pipeline engineering, along with the ability to work through ambiguity, balance strategic thinking with attention to detail, and set high engineering standards. The engineer leads platform service architecture and delivery, develops Kubernetes-native and serverless systems, operates event-driven platforms, and champions security, observability, availability, and resiliency. The role also owns the team’s CI/CD strategy, influences architecture and platform standards with partner teams, mentors engineers, and provides technical leadership for cross-functional initiatives and complex escalations. BlackLine describes its workplace as a combination of virtual and in-person interactions; candidates living within a reasonable commute of an office are expected to work onsite at least three days per week.
Requirements
- 7–10+ years of experience in any combination of engineering, platform, or SRE roles.
- Expert, deep proficiency in at least one of Rust, C#, Python, Go, Java, or an equivalent language for platform engineering and SaaS development.
- Understanding of container-targeted application development, such as Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, or App Engine.
- Ability to use AI tools such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Cursor to improve development productivity and delivery efficiency while curating code quality.
- Production experience with GCP and/or AWS at scale, and strong understanding of core services including BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, VPC networking, and IAM.
- Experience with stateful databases and key-value datastores, such as PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, and ValKey.
- Demonstrated ability to drive architectural decisions, lead platform-level initiatives, and influence cross-functional engineering teams.
- Ability to think and execute like a technically minded product owner, translating leadership decisions and organizational initiatives into priorities and delivery milestones.
- Experience designing and operating event-driven platforms such as Kafka, Airflow, or equivalent.
- Strong written and oral communication skills, with a record of building productive relationships across engineering, product, and IT organizations.
- Drive for operational improvement, including the ability to identify bottlenecks, implement change, and raise quality across teams.
Nice To Haves
- Proficiency with Kubernetes, including scheduler optimization, GitOps workflows via ArgoCD, configuration management via Kustomize, and security tooling.
- Familiarity with frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.
- Hands-on experience with Google Cloud managed services, including BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, and relevant compute products.
- Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or CloudFormation, and experience with Ansible or comparable configuration management tooling.
- Experience with container security scanning, policy enforcement, and supply-chain tooling.
Responsibilities
- Serve as technical lead and subject matter expert for platform service architecture, driving the design and delivery of scalable, resilient, cloud-native infrastructure.
- Architect and develop Kubernetes-native systems, including serverless architectures using stateless services and Knative sequences.
- Design and operate event-driven systems using platforms such as Kafka and Pub/Sub, with an understanding of eventually consistent, efficient services.
- Apply a security-first approach to platform design, including network topology, firewall policy, container hardening, logging, monitoring, availability, and resiliency.
- Establish and maintain observability with custom sensors, dashboards, and alerting to monitor health, performance, and SLO compliance.
- Own and evolve the team’s CI/CD strategy, balancing operational efficiency with toolchain security.
- Collaborate with and influence engineering, product, and IT teams on architecture decisions, IaC principles, and platform standards.
- Mentor engineers and define and uphold documentation, operational runbooks, and engineering standards.
- Provide technical leadership for major cross-functional initiatives and serve as an escalation point for complex issues.
- Identify operational bottlenecks, implement improvements, and raise engineering quality across teams.
Benefits
- Professional development seminars.
- Inclusive affinity groups.
- Short-term and long-term incentive programs, based on eligibility.
- Benefit and wellness plans.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
