Job Summary:The Staff Platform Engineer sets the technical direction for the platform and solves infrastructure problems that span teams. The role stays hands-on - writing and reviewing infrastructure code and operating production systems - but most of its impact comes from shaping how the whole engineering organization builds, deploys, and runs software, without formal management authority. Staff engineers may also serve as a team's Tech Lead, a role that carries no change in title, band, or bonus.
Key Responsibilities:- Regularly audit and evaluate the platform's architecture, and lead the design and delivery of major
- architectural changes across teams on an annual basis.
- Write technical proposals for those changes and build agreement on them with product and engineering
- stakeholders.
- Set org-wide standards for infrastructure patterns, delivery practices, tooling, and technology choices.
- Partner with Buyer and Cargo engineering leadership so the platform supports what their teams need to build
- next.
- Define observability, reliability, and incident standards, and take on the hardest production problems: systemic
- bottlenecks, performance crises, and failures under heavy contention.
- Plan and carry out large migrations, such as database moves, network re-architecture, and project
- restructuring, without disrupting live auctions.
- Own the platform's security, cost, and capacity strategy.
- Mentor senior engineers and act as a force multiplier, influencing direction without formal authority.
Requirements
Qualifications / Requirements:- Autonomy: Leads strategy - defines technical direction without day-to-day oversight.
- Technical Depth: Visionary - deep expertise with the ability to see and shape the broader technical landscape.
- Leadership Impact: Force multiplier and system architect - makes entire teams more effective.
- Business Impact: Strategic - future-proofs systems and drives technical decisions that enable business growth.
- Experience: 7-10+ years of professional engineering experience, with a demonstrated record of infrastructure or platform impact across teams.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Advanced study in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline (Master's or equivalent graduate-level work) is a strong differentiator at this level.
Technical Skills- Languages: Expert-level proficiency in TypeScript and strong proficiency in Go or Python.
- Infrastructure as Code: Sets standards for infrastructure as code - state management, resource lifecycle, refactoring and aliasing, and reusable component design. Pulumi in TypeScript is a strong plus.
- Cloud: GCP architecture expertise - designs for reliability, cost efficiency, and scale across GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and BigQuery.
- Networking: Network architecture expertise - multi-project VPC design, private service connectivity, load balancing, mTLS, and traffic management.
- Databases: Deep expertise in operating MySQL, PostgreSQL, and distributed SQL - replication, connection pooling, schema evolution at scale, and zero-downtime migrations.
- Observability: Designs and owns observability strategy - alerting, SLOs/SLAs, and distributed tracing.
- Security: Understands security at the architecture level - auth patterns, secrets management, network security, IAM, and defending against abusive traffic.
- Technical Fundamentals: Expert-level distributed systems knowledge - consensus, replication strategies, concurrency control under write contention, exactly-once semantics, and fault-tolerant design; OS and runtime internals relevant to performance (GC behavior, syscall overhead, context switching); systems design fluency - can decompose and reason about large-scale distributed architectures from first principles.
Nice to Have- Temporal or other durable workflow orchestration.
- CockroachDB, PgBouncer, or large-scale database migration and replication.
- Cloud Armor, WAF, or bot-mitigation experience.
- Vertex AI or other ML serving infrastructure.
- Experience architecting systems with heavy write contention, such as many users acting on the same records at once in bidding, inventory, or payments.
Physical Requirements:- Ability to remain seated or stationary for extended periods while working at a computer.
- Frequent use of hands and fingers for typing, mouse use, and other computer-related tasks.
- Ability to communicate effectively in person, by phone, and through electronic communication.
- Ability to occasionally stand, walk, bend, reach, or move about the office.
- Ability to occasionally lift and carry office equipment or materials up to 10-15 pounds.
- Visual ability sufficient to read computer screens, documents, and other work-related materials.
- Ability to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation.
