Staff Platform Engineer

Role Summary

As Staff Platform Engineer, you will own and define the architecture of Cortex's infrastructure and platform. Working closely with engineering leadership and product, you will lead the foundational platform work that keeps us scalable, reliable, and secure as we grow - the deploy pipeline, multi-tenant isolation, database stability, and the deployment and compliance capabilities (including dedicated / single-tenant instances and FedRAMP-class requirements) that our largest customers depend on.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and best practices for the platform and infrastructure layer the product is built on
• Own the deploy pipeline and lead the move to a GitOps model (Argo) for fast, safe releases
• Design and harden multi-tenant isolation and blast-radius protection for top-tier customers, including the path to dedicated / single-tenant deployments
• Lead database stabilization and the platform work behind performance, availability, and safe migrations
• Build the infrastructure foundations for compliance-heavy and government deployments (encryption, authentication, boundary and data-flow design)
• Set the standard for observability, on-call, and operational readiness across engineering, and evangelize platform-first thinking
• Collaborate with leadership and product to translate platform capabilities into customer-facing offerings

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, operating, and scaling high-performance production systems
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform)
• Strong database proficiency (e.g. Postgres) with experience in performance, availability, and migrations at scale
• Architectural judgment at the system and cross-team level - you reason about blast radius and the next class of failure (multi-region, scale step-changes) before it bites
• Working proficiency in at least one application language (JVM preferred) - comfortable going into the code to debug or ship a change where the infra and application layers meet
• Strong security mindset - IaC, secrets management, least privilege, and common appsec risks
• Fluent, critical use of AI in day-to-day engineering, reviewing AI output as carefully as a teammate's PR