Staff Platform Engineer

UKG•Atlanta, GA

2d•$129,500 - $186,100

About The Position

UKG is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join their team. This role involves designing, automating, operating, and continuously improving critical database services across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments. The team manages and supports multiple database and messaging platforms including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and MySQL. The ideal candidate will possess strong DevOps, infrastructure automation, Kubernetes, Linux, and production-operations experience. While database expertise is valuable, it's not required for every technology. This position is suited for an engineer who thrives on building reliable platforms, automating operational processes, troubleshooting complex production issues, and enabling development teams through self-service workflows for database consumption.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering.
Strong hands-on experience supporting production environments and mission-critical services.
Deep knowledge of Linux administration, troubleshooting, system performance, networking fundamentals, and security practices.
Strong experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads.
Production experience with OpenStack or comparable private-cloud and infrastructure platforms.
Strong experience developing and maintaining Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
Experience with Terragrunt for managing reusable and multi-environment infrastructure configurations.
Experience building CI/CD automation using GitHub Actions or similar tools.
Experience with cloud-native technologies and hybrid infrastructure environments.
Programming or scripting experience in at least one language, such as Python, Bash, Go, or another modern programming language.
Experience automating operational processes, infrastructure workflows, or service-management tasks.
Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
Proven ability to troubleshoot complex issues across application, infrastructure, operating-system, and networking layers.
Experience participating in incident response, on-call support, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvement activities.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Relevant certifications in cloud platforms, Kubernetes, Linux, Terraform, OpenStack, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.
Experience supporting hybrid-cloud or multi-environment infrastructure.
Experience with open-source cloud-native technologies and projects.
Familiarity with SRE principles, DevOps practices, and reliability engineering.
Experience with GitOps workflows and advanced CI/CD automation.
Knowledge of certificate-management systems such as cert-manager, ACME, and PKI.
Experience with database backup, recovery, replication, high availability, disaster recovery, or performance optimization.
Background managing database and messaging platforms such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, or MySQL.
Experience with managed database services such as MongoDB Atlas, AWS RDS, or GCP Cloud SQL.
Experience with service migrations, database version upgrades, or platform modernization.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate infrastructure platforms that deliver critical database services at scale.
Develop and maintain infrastructure automation for provisioning, configuration, upgrades, migrations, and lifecycle management.
Manage database services across hybrid environments, including on-premises infrastructure, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and public cloud platforms.
Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Terragrunt.
Develop and manage Kubernetes deployments, Helm charts, operators, and platform integrations.
Create and improve CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions and related automation tools.
Automate certificate management, secrets handling, service upgrades, backup processes, and operational tasks.
Support the full lifecycle of database services, from provisioning and configuration through maintenance, scaling, migration, and decommissioning.
Troubleshoot service failures, provisioning issues, replication problems, performance degradation, capacity constraints, and connectivity issues.
Respond to and resolve P1/P2 production incidents across database, messaging, Kubernetes, Linux, and infrastructure platforms.
Participate in an on-call rotation for mission-critical services.
Improve monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and operational visibility using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
Define and improve service reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and disaster-recovery capabilities.
Develop runbooks, operational procedures, architecture documentation, and incident knowledge articles.
Review designs and code, establish engineering standards, and provide technical leadership across the platform team.
Mentor engineers and share knowledge related to DevOps, infrastructure automation, Kubernetes, Linux, and production operations.
Collaborate with application, security, networking, cloud, and database teams to deliver reliable services that meet business needs.
Identify opportunities to reduce manual effort, improve developer self-service, and strengthen platform consistency across environments.