Staff Platform Network Engineer

FanDuel•Atlanta, GA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Our roster has an opening with your name on it As a Staff Platform Network Engineer, you'll design, build, and mature the service connectivity platform that underpins how FanDuel services communicate with each other and the outside world. Your focus will be delivering secure, scalable, and reliable connectivity across our hybrid cloud environment through service mesh, ingress, gateway APIs, TLS, and edge-routing capabilities that enable teams to move quickly and safely. This role lands at a pivotal moment in our platform evolution. We're rolling out Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh (with Impart) across our EKS estate and evolving toward a standardized, self-service connectivity platform. You'll help shape the long-term architecture, operating model, and migration strategy away from legacy ingress patterns, while ensuring the platform remains reliable, secure, and sustainable at scale. This is a hands-on builder-operator role. You'll partner closely with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable connectivity capabilities, serve as a subject matter expert in service mesh and traffic management, and help teams adopt reliable patterns for service-to-service communication. By connecting platform behavior to real user impact, you'll drive improvements in reliability, performance, security, and operational maturity across the organization. In addition to the specific responsibilities outlined above, employees may be required to perform other such duties as assigned by the Company. This ensures operational flexibility and allows the Company to meet evolving business needs.

Requirements

Significant hands-on experience in platform engineering, SRE, cloud infrastructure, or related fields, with a track record of driving impact across multiple teams or domains.
Strong expertise in modern service mesh technologies (e.g. Istio, Kong Mesh, Linkerd, or Envoy-based platforms), including mTLS enforcement, traffic policy design, and service-to-service security patterns.
Deep expertise in Kubernetes networking and service connectivity, including CNIs, ingress controllers, gateway APIs, and operating distributed systems at scale across hybrid AWS environments.
Working knowledge of AWS networking primitives such as VPCs, Route 53, PrivateLink, ALB/NLB, and CloudFront, with the ability to reason end-to-end across L3 through L7 networking layers.
Experience defining and driving platform, reliability, or connectivity strategy across teams, with the ability to influence technical direction and engineering standards.
Strong understanding of distributed systems principles and the real-world trade-offs involved in highly available service-to-service communication.
Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategies for connectivity infrastructure using user-centric and business-aligned metrics.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript), and experience building scalable tooling, automation, and platform capabilities.
Experience implementing zero-trust networking principles, including workload identity and mutual TLS at scale.
Experience driving large-scale operational improvements through automation, reducing organizational toil, and eliminating recurring classes of issues.
Strong analytical and communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders and translate technical constraints into business and customer impact.
A mindset of ownership, continuous improvement, and long-term platform sustainability.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with Kong Gateway and/or Kong Mesh.
Familiarity with eBPF-based networking technologies such as Cilium and their implications for performance and observability at scale.
CNCF Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKS, or CKAD).
Experience operating in regulated industries where network segmentation, auditability, and security controls are critical.

Responsibilities

Defining and driving the service connectivity strategy and roadmap across multiple teams, aligning with business priorities, regulatory requirements, and engineering goals.
Maturing our Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh rollout into a production-grade platform across our EKS estate, including mTLS enforcement, traffic policy standardization, self-service onboarding, and migration from legacy ingress patterns.
Designing and evolving scalable connectivity capabilities spanning service mesh, ingress, gateways, TLS and certificate automation, DNS, and L7 edge routing across hybrid AWS environments, including AWS Outposts.
Establishing best practices for service-to-service communication, zero-trust networking, traffic management, and certificate lifecycle management across the organization.
Building infrastructure-as-code, tooling, automation, and platform guardrails that improve reliability, reduce operational toil, and enable safe self-service adoption.
Leading cross-team initiatives to improve connectivity reliability, reduce systemic operational risk, and drive platform-level resilience improvements.
Leveraging automation and AI-assisted workflows to accelerate root cause analysis and improve operational efficiency at scale.
Leading complex production incident response across Kubernetes networking, ingress, DNS, load balancing, service mesh, and cloud edge infrastructure.
Stewarding connectivity platforms operating under strict regulatory and compliance requirements, ensuring secure operation, auditability, and disciplined change management.
Partnering with engineering and product leadership to influence platform direction, roadmap priorities, and long-term connectivity strategy.
Evaluating build-versus-buy decisions and vendor capabilities against platform requirements and operational sustainability goals.
Mentoring engineers and raising the connectivity and platform networking maturity across the organization.

Benefits

Health plans (some as low as $0 per paycheck)
Programs for fertility and family planning
Mental health support
Fitness benefits
Generous paid time off (PTO & sick leave)
Annual bonus
Long-term incentive opportunities (based on performance)
401k with up to a 5% match
Commuter benefits
Pet insurance
Medical, vision, and dental insurance
Life insurance
Disability insurance
401(k) matching program
Short-term or long-term incentive compensation, including, but not limited to, cash bonuses and stock program participation
Paid personal time off
14 paid company holidays
Paid sick time in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws