Highly Skilled Platform Engineer

Job Title:
Highly Skilled Platform Engineer

Key Responsibilities:
We are seeking a highly skilled platform engineer to own the availability, latency, performance, and efficiency of our SaaS on Azure.
Reliability Standards
Define customer-centric service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
Publish, review quarterly, and align teams to these standards.

Error Budgeting
Implement error-budget policy with multi-window and multi-burn-rate alerts.
Clear runbooks and paging thresholds.
Gate changes by budget status (freeze/relax rules) wired into continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).

SLO/EB Dashboards
Maintain SLO/EB dashboards (Azure Monitor, Grafana/Prometheus, App Insights).
Run weekly SLO reviews with engineering/product.

Incident Response
Lead severe events without drama.
Own communications, run blameless postmortems, and make corrective actions stick.

Observability
Engineer reliability in multi-AZ/region patterns (active-active/DR), pod disruption budgets (PDBs)/pod topology spread, horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA)/vertical pod autoscaling (VPA)/Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling (KEDA), resilient rollout/rollback.
Optimize AKS at scale: Harden clusters (network, identity, policy), optimize node/pod density, ingress (AGIC/Nginx); mesh optional.

IaC & Policy
Maintain infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy: Terraform/Bicep modules, GitOps (Flux/Argo), policy-as-code (Azure Policy/Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper). No snowflakes.

CI/CD Reliability
Ensure CI/CD reliability: Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions with canary/blue-green, progressive delivery, auto-rollback, Key Vault-backed secrets.

Capacity & Performance
Partner with FinOps to reduce spend without hurting SLOs.

Disaster Recovery
Define recovery time objective (RTO)/recovery point objective (RPO), test backups/restore, run game days/chaos drills, validate Azure Site Recovery and multi-region failover.

Security
Implement secure-by-default: Entra ID (Azure AD), managed identities, Key Vault rotation, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, shift-left checks in CI.

Toil Reduction
Reduce toil: Automate recurring operations, build self-service runbooks/chatops, publish golden paths for product teams.

Customer Escalations
Communicate tradeoffs and recovery plans with authority during customer escalations.

Documentation
Document architectures, runbooks, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs—kept current and discoverable.

Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelor's in computer science/engineering (or equivalent experience).
12+ years in production operations/platform/site reliability engineering, including 5+ years on Azure.
PostgreSQL expertise incl. high availability/disaster recovery, logical/physical replication, performance tuning (indexes/EXPLAIN/ANALYZE, pg_stat_statements), autovacuum strategy, partitioning, backup/restore testing, and connection pooling (pgBouncer).
Azure core: AKS; Front Door/App Gateway, API Management, VNets/NSGs/Private Link, Storage, Key Vault, Redis, Service Bus/Event Hubs.
Observability: Azure Monitor/App Insights, Log Analytics, Prometheus/Grafana; SLO design and error-budget operations.
IaC/automation: Terraform and/or Bicep; PowerShell and Python; GitOps (Flux/Argo). Pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
Proven incident leadership at scale, blameless postmortems, and SLO/error-budget governance with change gating.
Mentorship and crisp written/verbal communication.

Preferred (nice to have):
Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Certified Kubernetes Administrator/Certified Kubernetes Application Developer.
IT service management (ServiceNow), on-call tooling (PagerDuty/Opsgenie).
Compliance/security operations (SOC 2, ISO 27001), policy-as-code, workload identity.
OpenTelemetry, eBPF tooling, or service mesh.
Multi-tenant SaaS and cost optimization at scale.

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