Staff Platform Engineer

Role Description

Platform at Sendcloud is structured around two focused teams. Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure — EKS, VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, and Terraform modules — the engine room everything runs on. Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer — CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, observability tooling, and DORA metrics — the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely.

• As the Staff Platform Engineer, you're the senior individual-contributor anchor of the Platform domain, sitting at the intersection of technical excellence, cross-team enablement, and strategic delivery.
• You don't just solve problems — you define which problems are worth solving, with impact measured by the collective output, platform health, and engineering velocity of the teams you influence, not by what you personally ship.
• This is a destination role, not a stepping-stone into management — built for engineers who want to stay deeply technical while operating at real organisational and strategic scope.
• You partner closely with Engineering leadership and Principal Engineers to set and drive the technical direction of the Platform domain.

Must have

• 7+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with at least 3 years operating at senior or staff level in a platform, infrastructure, or SRE function.
• Deep AWS expertise: EKS, VPC/networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, WAF, KMS, and Lambda — you understand the stack Sendcloud runs on.
• Production-grade Kubernetes: Helm, Karpenter, Envoy Gateway, KEDA, Kyverno, workload patterns, RBAC, and cluster operations at scale.
• Infrastructure as Code mastery: Terraform modules, composition, and state management, with extensive experience designing modules and applying best practices at scale.
• CI/CD and progressive delivery: GitLab CI, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts (canary, blue-green), pipeline design, and change failure rate reduction.
• Observability as a discipline: Datadog (APM, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, scorecards, log configuration), DORA metrics, and the ability to define what healthy looks like for a platform service.
• Security thinking embedded in daily work: IAM hygiene, zero-trust principles, secrets management, JIT access, OAuth2/OIDC, audit logging, and compliance readiness (SOC2, GDPR).
• Proven track record of owning and delivering complex, cross-team technical initiatives from problem framing to production — not just contributing to them.
• Strong written and verbal English: you can write a compelling ADR, present trade-offs to a non-technical stakeholder, and give direct technical feedback in a code review.

Strong advantage (nice to have)

• Experience with platform engineering in a SaaS scale-up context — you understand the difference between building for a startup and operating a platform with enterprise-grade commitments.
• Hands-on experience with developer experience tooling: Internal Developer Portals, golden paths, developer self-service, and measuring adoption.
• FinOps awareness: cost-per-service thinking, Graviton/ARM adoption, reserved instance strategy, and the ability to articulate infrastructure ROI.
• Event-driven architecture experience: NATS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar in high-throughput, multi-tenant environments.
• Experience with AI/LLM governance in an engineering context: centralised API gateways, cost controls, data privacy safeguards, and GDPR-compliant usage patterns.

🎉 Benefits

💸 Salary - From €100,000 gross annually, inclusive of 8% holiday pay (based on your specific skillset and professional background).

🧠 Brain Benefits - €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team

🌴 Time Benefits - 28 days of paid vacations per year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones

✈️ Sabbatical Benefits - 4 weeks fully paid every 3 years

🏡 Home Benefits - Flexible hybrid model (min. 1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget

💪 Body Benefits - Company gym · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee

🚌 Travel Benefits - Monthly commuting allowance

🪑 Future Benefits - Pension scheme · Employee discount programs

🐾 Vibe Benefits - Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar