Staff Software Engineer - Services Platform

Mercury•Portland, OR

3d•$239,000 - $298,800

About The Position

Mercury's services ecosystem is transitioning as more of the company moves beyond its core Haskell monolith. Product teams are increasingly building and operating independent services, which creates infrastructure challenges related to service authentication, discovery, safe deployment, and system health monitoring. This role is for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer who will be a technical owner of Mercury’s services platform, helping to define the standard practices for building and running services. The position is deeply technical, requiring excellent judgment on standardization, flexibility, pace of change, and organizational alignment. This role is seen as a trailblazer for future engineers, emphasizing the importance of foundational work and relationship building across the organization.

Requirements

Deep experience operating Kubernetes in production and strong instincts around deployment architecture, failure modes, and migrations.
Designed or materially owned service-to-service authentication, workload identity, service discovery, service mesh, or related distributed-systems infrastructure.
Experience building self-service observability or operational tooling for application engineers.
Strong opinions about platform design, paired with the judgment to know when not to build something.
Think of internal platforms as products. Adoption, ergonomics, defaults, documentation, and escape hatches matter alongside technical architecture.
Able to gain alignment across teams with different goals and perspectives without requiring unanimity or creating unnecessary friction.
Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly enough that engineers understand both the decision and the reasoning behind it.
Enjoy operating at the boundary between deep technical work and broad organizational leverage.
Experience building an internal developer platform or service infrastructure at a scaled engineering organization would be particularly useful, but we care more about the systems you built, the decisions you made, and whether other teams successfully adopted them than the logo on your résumé.

Responsibilities

Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.
Own the strategy for service ecosystem at Mercury including identity, authentication, discovery and communication.
Work with product stakeholders and Release Engineering to create a paved deployment path with strong defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration, secrets, and operational safety.
Help evolve Mercury’s service runtime architecture, including our use of Kubernetes, while keeping existing services healthy through the transition.
Make observability self-service so product engineers can understand and debug their systems without routing every question through Infrastructure.
Partner closely with Release Engineering, Security, and product engineering teams to create infrastructure that is compliant with financial regulations and useful enough that teams actively want to adopt it.
Find the highest-leverage gaps in our services ecosystem and ship pragmatic improvements instead of waiting for a perfect future architecture.
Establish patterns that let Mercury support many more services without multiplying operational complexity at the same rate.
Mentor engineers and shape infrastructure thinking beyond the systems you directly own.