Staff Platform Engineer

Horizon3

9d•$199,750 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

Horizon3 is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join their Internal Platform Team (IPT). This role will be responsible for shaping the cloud and delivery foundations behind the NodeZero platform. The engineer will lead complex, cross-team initiatives, define platform direction, improve developer workflows, and establish standards for secure, reliable, and operable systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems and building reusable platform capabilities.

Requirements

8+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, SRE, DevOps, or software engineering with substantial production-platform ownership.
Deep experience designing and operating cloud platforms, preferably AWS.
Strong Kubernetes experience, including production operations, networking, reliability, and troubleshooting.
Strong infrastructure-as-code and automation experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or comparable tools.
Experience operating CI/CD and delivery infrastructure.
Strong understanding of IAM, secrets, networking, ingress, and least privilege.
Experience with distributed-systems observability and operational practices.
Proficiency in Go and Python for platform services, developer tooling, or automation.
Demonstrated success leading complex initiatives across multiple teams.
Excellent communication, mentoring, and technical-influence skills.

Nice To Haves

Multi-region or multi-environment SaaS platform experience.
Internal developer platform, declarative API, or Platform-as-a-Service experience.
GitLab CI/CD, self-hosted runners, OpenTelemetry, or Datadog experience.
Ephemeral-environment, automated-provisioning, or platform-lifecycle experience.
Security-sensitive, regulated, or cybersecurity experience.
Startup or high-growth company experience.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and evolution of AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, and shared platform services.
Define architecture for infrastructure automation, service delivery, regional capabilities, and ephemeral environments.
Build reusable platform capabilities, self-service workflows, and release-safety practices.
Evolve infrastructure-as-code and declarative approaches, including Terraform and Crossplane-related capabilities.
Improve platform reliability, observability, security, performance, and operability.
Participate in on-call and incident response, leading post-incident improvements.
Drive high-impact initiatives across multiple teams and balance reliability, security, cost, developer experience, and delivery speed.
Establish platform standards, reduce technical debt, and guide design decisions.
Partner with feature teams to turn platform needs into durable solutions.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across Engineering.
Improve documentation, runbooks, interfaces, and self-service paths.
Communicate clearly and build alignment across Platform, Application Engineering, Data Engineering, Product, Program Management, and Security.