Staff Platform Engineer (MANTL)

Alkami Technology•Bentonville, AR

6d•$140,000 - $175,000•Remote

About The Position

The Staff Platform Engineer leads the effort to locate, make visible, and remediate sources of unreliability in the MANTL platform, including correctness problems that surface under failure conditions. This role works directly in the platform's application codebase (TypeScript) and its container-native deployment environment, combining application-engineering skill with reliability-engineering practice at a level of scope and independence beyond the Sr Platform Engineer. In addition to resolving reactive issues as they surface, this role owns and prioritizes a standing roadmap of known reliability risks, driving that work forward on its own timeline. This role partners with, but is organizationally and functionally distinct from, both Cloud Infrastructure Engineering and product application engineering teams, and is expected to set technical direction and standards for platform reliability work.

Requirements

Minimum 7 to 10 years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or a hybrid development/reliability engineering role
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience
Deep proficiency in TypeScript, with significant production experience in a Node.js/TypeScript service environment
Strong hands-on experience deploying, operating, and troubleshooting containerized workloads in Kubernetes
Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions preferred
Proven experience designing monitoring, dashboard, and alerting strategy in an APM/observability tool, Datadog preferred
Deep experience troubleshooting distributed system and microservice communication failures across a variety of integration points and protocols
Strong experience with distributed tracing tools and practices at scale
Working familiarity with relational databases, sufficient to diagnose and resolve complex query and schema-level performance issues
Proven track record resolving significant application performance issues (caching, inefficient code paths, slow queries)
Experience designing and leading failure-mode testing (fault injection, resilience/chaos-style testing) and driving adoption of defensive patterns such as idempotency, retries, and circuit breakers
Demonstrated ability to work independently on ambiguous, high-impact reliability problems and to set technical direction for others
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present technical root cause, risk, and remediation plans to engineering and non-technical leadership
Experience mentoring other engineers

Nice To Haves

Experience with message brokers or event-streaming platforms such as Kafka, particularly at scale
Experience with OpenTelemetry or comparable distributed tracing frameworks at scale
Experience in a regulated or compliance-driven environment (fintech, banking, or similar)
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform or similar)
Experience partnering with infrastructure/SRE teams on issues that cross application and infrastructure boundaries
Experience influencing engineering roadmap prioritization to secure time for platform stability work

Responsibilities

Lead investigation, troubleshooting, and resolution of the most complex reliability issues within MANTL platform application code, including microservice communication failures and correctness issues that emerge under failure conditions
Set direction for how the platform identifies and addresses failure modes across its third-party and internal system integrations, establishing resilience strategies suited to each integration's specific behavior
Own the design and evolution of monitoring, dashboards, and alerting strategy (Datadog preferred) across the platform, ensuring proactive visibility into emerging risks
Establish standards and lead implementation of distributed tracing across microservices to accelerate root-cause identification organization-wide
Lead diagnosis and remediation of significant application performance issues, including caching strategy, inefficient code paths, and query performance
Set direction for platform and application hardening practices, including fault-injection and resilience testing, and drive adoption of defensive design patterns to prevent recurrence
Own and improve CI/CD build pipeline architecture (GitHub Actions) supporting deployment of the platform
Guide deployment and troubleshooting of container-native (Kubernetes) workloads as part of resolving complex platform reliability issues
Define, prioritize, and drive execution of a roadmap of known reliability risks, independent of feature-delivery timelines
Establish and maintain documentation and runbook standards covering platform reliability issues, root causes, and remediations
Serve as the senior escalation point for complex platform reliability issues, partnering with Cloud Infrastructure Engineering and application engineering leadership on issues that cross domain boundaries
Define reliability targets (SLOs/SLIs) for key platform services and advise leadership on reliability risk and tradeoffs
Provide technical mentorship and guidance to other Platform Engineers