Staff DevEx & Platform Engineer - AWS, GCP & K8s

Demandbase is the leading B2B pipeline AI platform, empowering go-to-market teams to align account-based strategies, eliminate tech stack waste, and automate growth at scale.

As a Staff DevOps Engineer on the Developer Experience (DevEx) team, you will set the multi-quarter technical roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP), tooling, and workflows that every engineering team across Demandbase relies on to deploy reliably to production. This is an organizational-level technical leadership role, not a single-team execution role. You will abstract cloud infrastructure complexity into paved roads across build, test, deploy, and operational stages—owning multi-account AWS and GCP environments, fleet-scale Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE), GitOps pipelines, service mesh (Istio), and observability platforms. Additionally, you will guide how the engineering org safely adopts AI-assisted and agentic development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex).

Key Responsibilities

• Platform Strategy & Technical Leadership: Author, review, and approve org-wide RFCs and architectural design documents; act as the primary technical review authority for infrastructure-impacting changes across engineering.
• Internal Developer Platform (IDP) Product Ownership: Own and evolve Demandbase's Backstage service catalog, golden-path scaffolder templates, and shared CI/CD component libraries as a product—measured by developer adoption, time-to-first-deploy, and toil reduction.
• Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Architecture: Own the lifecycle and architecture of multi-cluster Kubernetes environments (EKS and GKE) at scale—including node lifecycle automation (Karpenter), multi-account IAM, networking, and security posture.
• Infrastructure-as-Code & GitOps: Drive enterprise-wide IaC strategy using Terraform and Crossplane, alongside GitOps deployment automation via Flux or Argo CD.
• Service Mesh & Networking: Architect and operate Istio service mesh across multi-cluster setups, enforcing sidecar injection strategies, traffic policy routing, and mutual TLS controls.
• CI/CD & Supply Chain Security: Architect high-throughput GitLab CI/CD pipelines, container vulnerability scanning, image signing, and hardened base image policies.
• Observability & FinOps: Own the observability platform strategy (Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Thanos) while managing cloud unit economics, resource cost visibility, and waste reduction.
• Incident Escalation & Mentorship: Serve as the final escalation point for high-severity platform outages, lead blameless postmortems turning findings into structural platform fixes, and mentor senior/staff engineers.

Requirements

Staff-Level Infrastructure & Software Engineering Depth

• 10+ years of total software engineering experience, including meaningful hands-on coding in Go, Python, or Java, combined with 7+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Proven track record operating as a Staff-level technical leader across multiple teams—driving cross-department RFCs, platform architectural strategy, and technical governance.
• Deep, hands-on production experience managing multi-account, multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms (Amazon EKS and/or Google GKE) across dozens of microservices.
• High proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Crossplane) and GitOps deployment strategies (Argo CD or Flux).
• Extensive experience designing CI/CD architectures supporting high release velocity and security guardrails (GitLab CI/CD preferred).
• Hands-on experience operating Istio service mesh in multi-cluster cloud environments.
• Deep experience managing enterprise observability suites (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Loki) with a cost-aware FinOps framework.
• Active fluency with AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) and informed strategy regarding safe org-wide rollout.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting data pipeline, batch processing, or big data platforms (Apache Airflow, Amazon EMR, Google Dataproc).
• Practical experience with cloud cost governance platforms (Vantage, Finout) and container security suites (Wiz, External Secrets Operator).
• Track record of defining and measuring organizational SLIs/SLOs and driving blameless postmortem cultures.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation: Competitive base salary + annual bonus eligibility + equity stock options.
• Healthcare & Wellbeing: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans; wellness resources and employee assistance programs.
• Retirement & Financial Protection: 401(k) plan options, life insurance, and short/long-term disability coverage.
• Work Culture & Perks: Flexible remote-first work environment, generous PTO, and continuous professional development support.