Description
We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction for our Runtime Foundation platform, leading our most ambiguous and consequential infrastructure work, and acting as a trusted technical authority for teams across Snyk.
You’ll spend your time:
- Setting technical strategy for the platform, shaping the roadmap with engineering and product leadership, and making the case for investment in reliability, resilience and cost.
- Leading cross-team, org-level infrastructure initiatives end-to-end, from problem framing and alignment through to production rollout and adoption.
- Acting as a technical authority for engineering teams across Snyk, setting infrastructure design standards, reviewing significant proposals, and influencing how teams build securely and reliably on our platform.
- Driving architectural direction for Kubernetes at scale, including cluster and node upgrade strategy, and leading diagnosis of deep networking, scheduling and resource-pressure issues in high-severity incidents.
- Defining the architecture for in-cluster platform services (ingress controllers, cert-manager, autoscaling components) and the Helm chart standards the wider organisation builds on.
- Shaping Terraform module architecture at organisational scale, including how state, drift and change safety are managed across a large multi-cloud estate.
- Making multi-cloud (AWS/GCP) architecture decisions with long-term consequences, including IAM, networking and managed-service resilience.
- Owning ingress, networking and service mesh architecture, including TLS, rate limiting and multi-tenant traffic design.
- Raising the engineering bar across the department: improving observability and operational practices, eliminating classes of toil systemically, and growing senior engineers through mentoring, sponsorship and example.
You should apply if you:
- Have extensive professional experience (typically 5+ years) operating and architecting production infrastructure at scale, with a track record of leading work at organisation level rather than team level.
- Have deep, hands-on expertise across Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm and multi-cloud (AWS/GCP) environments, and have led large, multi-team migrations or platform redesigns that shipped and stuck.
- Can take an ambiguous, cross-organisational problem, define what success looks like, build alignment across teams without formal authority, and communicate trade-offs clearly to engineers, directors and executive stakeholders.
- Have a history of making durable architectural decisions, and of knowing when to say no, when to defer and when to change course.
- Have mentored and sponsored senior engineers, and have measurably raised the technical bar of a team or department.
- Are comfortable being the go-to technical authority for other teams, and for leadership during significant incidents and risk discussions.
- Treat clear documentation (design docs, ADRs, runbooks) and automated testing as core to sustainable engineering, and set the example for others.