Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

Amperon•Houston, TX

2d•Remote

About The Position

Amperon is hiring a Staff Cloud Platform Engineer for its Infrastructure & Security team. This hands-on senior individual-contributor role owns major parts of the Azure and Kubernetes platform supporting the company’s product, data pipelines, and AI agents. The engineer will set technical direction for platform areas, lead multi-month programs from design through cutover, and improve how engineering teams build and operate software. The position reports to the Director of Infrastructure & Security. The role spans cloud infrastructure, site reliability, and security. It includes operating and evolving AKS clusters; leading Terraform infrastructure-as-code practices and delivery pipelines; ensuring resilient MySQL Flexible Server and self-managed ClickHouse databases; building secure, observable environments for AI-agent workloads; improving observability and cloud costs; and sharing on-call, incident response, mentoring, and documentation responsibilities. This is a fully remote position open to candidates in UK, EU, or US time zones. Candidates are expected to have at least three hours of daily overlap with US Central Time and participate in an on-call rotation scheduled during their local hours. Amperon is a global energy forecasting company serving power and utility companies with demand, renewable generation, and price forecasts.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering, including several years at a senior level owning production systems.
A track record of leading multi-month infrastructure programs end to end, including design documentation, stakeholder alignment, phased rollout, cutover, and cleanup.
Deep hands-on production Kubernetes experience, ideally with a managed offering such as AKS, EKS, or GKE, including networking and network policy.
Strong Terraform skills on a large codebase and experience with GitOps-style workflows such as Atlantis or ArgoCD.
Production experience with at least one major cloud provider. Azure is strongly preferred; deep AWS or GCP experience is acceptable with willingness to build deep Azure expertise.
Production experience operating relational or analytical databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or ClickHouse, including replication, upgrades, and recovery.
Security-focused practices including least privilege, identity-based access rather than static credentials, secrets management, and network isolation.
A solid observability practice covering metrics, logs, traces, trusted alerting, and SLO thinking.
Ability to write Python and shell for automation and tooling.
Clear written communication for design documents, pull requests, and asynchronous collaboration across time zones.

Nice To Haves

Experience running ClickHouse at scale, including clustering and replication.
Experience with Argo Workflows or other high-volume batch and workflow platforms.
Experience with Cilium, Karpenter, or Node Auto Provisioning on AKS.
Experience building infrastructure for AI agents or LLM workloads, including sandboxing, egress controls, model gateways, or Azure AI Foundry.
Daily use of AI coding agents such as Claude Code.
Experience with compliance programs such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
Experience with Azure cloud cost management (FinOps).
Experience in energy, utilities, or time-series data platforms.

Responsibilities

Run and evolve production, workflow, and AI/agent AKS clusters using technologies including Karpenter, Cilium network policy, workload identity, External Secrets, Helm, and ArgoCD.
Lead the Terraform estate, including provider upgrades, drift reconciliation, module design, guardrails, GitHub Actions runners, and build pipelines.
Operate MySQL Flexible Server and self-managed ClickHouse with a focus on replication, failover, backup and restore, capacity planning, and safe upgrades.
Design isolated and auditable environments for agentic workloads and MCP services, including egress controls, identity, observability, and safe self-service deployment of internal applications.
Evolve the observability stack using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Tempo; maintain alert rules as code and identify issues before they affect customers.
Identify and implement Azure cloud cost savings.
Participate in a cross-time-zone on-call rotation; lead incident response and blameless postmortems; and support data engineering, data science, and product teams.
Write design documents, review code, mentor engineers, and document systems to avoid single points of failure.
Lead multi-month infrastructure programs from design through rollout, cutover, and cleanup.