Lead Tech SRE

Accountabilities • Own the target architecture of the managed cloud platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including dedicated customer environments, clusters, networks, databases, queues, infrastructure templates, and regional deployment strategy.

• Define the architectural roadmap and guide the platform's evolution from Beta to General Availability, balancing customer isolation, reliability, scalability, and infrastructure costs. • Write and maintain technical specifications, design documents, RFCs, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), clearly explaining technical trade-offs and implementation choices. • Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for services and service tiers, using them to guide engineering priorities. • Lead technical delivery across a team of three, including yourself, by breaking down architectural plans into actionable work, assigning responsibilities, reviewing implementation, and removing blockers. • Establish engineering standards for Terraform modules, Helm charts, infrastructure configuration, and GitOps practices. • Automate the complete customer-instance lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, backups, migrations, and decommissioning. • Own the deployment and release strategy using ArgoCD and GitHub Actions, implementing progressive rollouts, rollback mechanisms, and safe upgrades across customer environments. • Build and maintain an end-to-end observability stack covering metrics, logs, traces, and alerting to identify and resolve issues proactively. • Lead on-call operations and incident response, including rotation planning, runbooks, blameless postmortems, and implementation of corrective actions. • Plan infrastructure capacity for variable workloads and ensure autoscaling strategies remain effective and reliable. • Drive cloud cost optimization through FinOps practices, including customer-level cost visibility, resource right-sizing, committed-use discounts, and appropriate use of spot instances. • Strengthen platform security in collaboration with the security engineer, covering network policies, workload identity, secrets management, and audit trails in support of SOC 2 expectations. • Collaborate with core platform engineering to identify product improvements that simplify cloud operations and improve platform reliability. • Lead the technical milestones for the first six months, including architecture assessment, GA specifications and SLOs, automated customer provisioning, observability coverage, and safe upgrade capabilities.

Requirements:

• At least 8 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including a minimum of 2 years leading technical direction for a team or platform. • Deep, production-grade Kubernetes expertise, including experience operating clusters at scale and managing upgrades, configuration drift, networking, and resource allocation. • Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, particularly GKE, IAM, VPC networking, private clusters, load balancing, and managed data services. • Expert-level Terraform skills, including the design of reusable module structures and state management approaches that support multiple identical customer environments. • Proven ability to define technical architecture, write detailed specifications, evaluate trade-offs, and translate designs into executable engineering plans. • Demonstrated experience coordinating technical delivery, reviewing implementation, and guiding a small engineering team. • Strong operational experience with on-call rotations, incident management, postmortems, and implementing lasting reliability improvements. • Background operating SaaS products for paying customers, with direct responsibility for production reliability and meaningful SLOs. • Fluent English and the ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fully remote international environment. • Pragmatic engineering judgment, with the ability to choose straightforward, maintainable solutions and clearly explain technical decisions. • Nice to have: Experience operating workloads that execute untrusted or user-defined code, including sandboxing, gVisor, or node-pool isolation. • Experience building or operating control planes for dedicated customer environments using Kubernetes operators, Crossplane, GKE Fleet, Config Sync, or custom provisioning systems. • Practical GCP FinOps experience, including customer-level cost attribution, committed-use discounts, and spot node pools. • Exposure to SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits from an infrastructure or platform engineering perspective. • Familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Temporal, or similar technologies, or experience with the JVM in production. • Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Kafka, and AMQP.