Staff Platform Engineer

As a Staff Platform Engineer in the Platform Engineering department at Sendcloud, you will work within the Foundation Platform / Developer Platform team as a senior individual contributor, reporting to the Engineering Manager, Platform.

🗂️ Role Overview

The Platform domain is the foundation everything else runs on — an AWS-native SaaS platform processing millions of parcels every day. As a Staff Platform Engineer, you own the technical direction for the infrastructure and developer experience layer that thousands of European e-commerce businesses depend on. You design the systems, set the standards, and make the engineers around you ship better, faster, and more reliably. When something breaks at scale, you’re one of the people who figures out why — and makes sure it never happens the same way again.

🛠️ Platform at Sendcloud

The Platform domain is structured around two focused teams:

Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure — EKS (Kubernetes), VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, Terraform modules, and operational reliability. It is the engine room that everything runs on.

Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer — CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Argo CD), progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts), observability tooling (Datadog APM and scorecards), DORA metrics, developer self-service, and the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely.

🧐 The Role

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you are the senior individual-contributor anchor of the Platform domain. You sit at the intersection of technical excellence, cross-team enablement, and strategic delivery — not just solving problems, but defining which problems are worth solving. Your impact is measured by the improvement in collective output, platform health, and engineering velocity across the teams that depend on the platform, not by what you personally ship.

This is not a stepping-stone into management. It is a destination for engineers who want to remain deeply technical while operating at the organisational and strategic scope that senior engineering leaders occupy. You will partner closely with Engineering leadership and Principal Engineers to set and drive the technical direction of the Platform domain.

🎯 What you’ll do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and own the technical strategy for cross-cutting platform capabilities: infrastructure reliability, observability, progressive delivery, security controls, and developer experience tooling
• Lead architectural decisions (ADRs) across Foundation and Developer Platform, ensuring choices are traceable to business outcomes and reviewed with Principal and Staff Engineers
• Drive platform-wide engineering standards: IaC module architecture, Kubernetes operational patterns, SLO/SLI frameworks, observability baselines, and zero-trust security controls
• Evaluate and own strategic technical decisions: Aurora PostgreSQL migration, AWS Graviton adoption, centralised AI governance via Amazon Bedrock, Okta IAM consolidation, OAuth2 standardisation, and domain-based IaC restructuring
• Proactively identify and remediate systemic technical debt — particularly where it creates delivery risk, blocks commercial goals, or threatens platform reliability

Cross-Team Delivery

• Scope, plan, and lead large platform initiatives spanning multiple teams with ambiguous or evolving requirements — examples include Progressive Delivery rollout, Centralised Authentication Platform, and Domain-Based IaC restructuring
• Own technical delivery of post-mortems with cross-team root cause: ensure lessons are shared organisation-wide and action items are closed within SLA
• Participate in the on-call rota; serve as a senior technical presence in high-severity incidents and own resolution end-to-end where needed
• Contribute to Peak Season preparation, capacity planning, and other organisation-wide technical programmes
• Participate in the Engineering Hiring Interviewer Pool and help raise the technical bar for platform engineering hires

Enablement & Multiplier Effect

• Act as a force multiplier: your primary success metric is the collective output and capability of the teams you influence, not your individual code contribution
• Mentor Senior Engineers across both Platform teams in cloud architecture, Kubernetes operations, reliability engineering, and platform thinking
• Produce and maintain high-quality internal artefacts — runbooks, design docs, ADRs, golden paths, DevOps Knowledge Base content — that reduce tribal knowledge and raise the engineering floor
• Champion the Platform as a Product mindset: validate standards with engineering teams before mandating them; ensure tooling makes compliance achievable before enforcement begins

Engineering Culture

• Model blameless but accountable engineering: lead post-mortems with genuine curiosity, drive follow-through on action items, and hold crucial conversations when needed
• Co-own DORA metrics baseline and improvement with Developer Platform; use data to drive engineering-wide conversations about delivery health
• Proactively communicate platform risks, constraints, and opportunities to Engineering Managers and domain leadership — surfacing what is invisible to others before it becomes a crisis

✅ What you bring to the table

Personally

• You think in systems, not tickets — you ask “what problem are we really solving?” before writing code or Terraform
• You are a calming force in incidents and complex cross-team debates — you disagree and commit, and you model that behaviour for the engineers around you
• You are comfortable with ambiguity: you scope large initiatives when requirements are unclear, and help others do the same
• You treat documentation and knowledge sharing as first-class engineering work, not an afterthought

Professionally — 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 (Kubernetes), VPC/networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, WAF, KMS, 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 — 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

Professionally — Strong Advantage

• 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

❤️ Our Values

💩 No bullshit: Big egos suck. Be open, honest, and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don’t just talk about problems — solve them.

🎯 Grow & Win: Be highly curious, adaptable, and proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours.

🎠 Have fun: Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you’re the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze — enjoy the ride.

🎉 Benefits

• 🧠 Brain: €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team
• 🌴 Time: 28 days paid vacation/year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones
• ✈️ Sabbatical: 4 weeks fully paid every 3 years
• 🏡 Home: Flexible hybrid model (min. 1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget
• 💪 Body: Company gym · Weekly bootcamp sessions · Weekly online yoga · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee
• 🚌 Travel: Monthly commuting allowance
• 🪑 Future: Pension scheme · Discount on health insurance · Employee discount programs
• 🐾 Vibe: Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar