Platform Engineer

Job description

Leafcloud is a sovereign cloud provider based in the Netherlands. We run real European infrastructure on open standards — OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes (Gardener) — for customers who care where their data lives and how their compute is powered.

We are also unusual in how we run our infrastructure. Our Leaf Sites are distributed compute installations placed inside buildings that need heat: data centres that warm offices, hotels, and apartments instead of sending hot air into the sky. The result is genuinely lower-carbon cloud — not a marketing claim, an architectural choice.

We’re a small team in a serious moment. We’re rebuilding our second OpenStack core, adding Leaf Sites, launching managed databases, and laying the groundwork for sovereign AI inference. There’s real ownership available to people who want to shape what European cloud looks like.

About the role

This role is the second engineer on Leafcloud’s platform-products team. You’ll pair with the Senior Platform Engineer (and the CTO) on building our managed database service, the customer-facing Kubernetes experience, and the customer portal.

We’re explicitly hiring for one of two complementary profiles:

Profile A — Backend-leaning. You’re Kubernetes-native, comfortable in Go, and at home with operator patterns and control-plane work. You’d own CloudNativePG configurations, Gardener Shoot lifecycle automation, and backend glue across platform components.

Profile B — Fullstack with frontend strength. You’re React/TypeScript first, comfortable in Kubernetes from the user side, and can write backend glue when needed. You’d own the customer portal layer, provisioning flows, account/billing UX, and the API clients between frontend and platform.

What you’ll do

Common to both profiles:

• Pair with the Senior Platform Engineer on platform-product delivery
• Build, ship, operate — this is a delivery role, not an architecture role
• Participate in platform-product on-call alongside your team
• Author runbooks for the systems you build

Profile A specifically:

• CloudNativePG operator configurations and Helm charts for DBaaS
• Customer-facing Gardener Shoot lifecycle automation
• Backend API surfaces and inter-service glue
• Strong Go and/or Python

Profile B specifically:

• Customer portal extension or build-out (React/TypeScript)
• Provisioning flows and lifecycle UX for DBaaS and Kubernetes
• Account, billing, quota dashboards
• Frontend-side observability and error tracking

Job requirements

Required, both profiles:

• 2–4 years in production engineering — you’ve shipped and operated something real
• Working Kubernetes experience: kubectl, Helm, manifests, RBAC
• Comfortable in code review and pair programming with senior engineers

Required for Profile A:

• Strong Go and/or Python
• Familiarity with at least one of: GitOps (Flux/ArgoCD), operator pattern, Postgres operations

Required for Profile B:

• 3+ years React / TypeScript in production
• Has shipped customer-facing UI in a B2B / infra / dev-tools context
• Strong UX instincts; pays attention to flows that actually work for users

Strongly preferred (either profile):

• Gardener exposure
• CloudNativePG or another operator-pattern database (Profile A)
• OpenStack ecosystem UI (Skyline, Horizon plugins) or Exosphere (Profile B)
• Multi-tenant SaaS experience