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Salary: USD 84,629 - 155,152 / annual
Alkira, a Lumen company, is transforming enterprise networking through its Network Infrastructure as a Service (NIaaS) platform. We are seeking a Senior Platform Infrastructure Software Engineer to own the foundational infrastructure layer that all other engineering teams depend on.
Platform Infrastructure builds the primitives other teams need to operate: the global Kubernetes cluster footprint across regions and cloud providers, the internal cluster running CI/CD runners and build platforms, shared infrastructure (databases, object storage, container registries), and the lifecycle of shared services. You will also design and publish reusable Terraform/OpenTofu modules that enable other teams to deliver infrastructure faster with built-in correctness and policy compliance.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own the global Kubernetes cluster footprint: provisioning, upgrades, multi-tenancy, resource and network policy, and failure isolation across regions and cloud providers
- Own the internal CI/CD cluster: capacity, isolation, scaling, and build performance
- Own shared infrastructure consumed by other teams: managed databases, object storage, container registries, and build platforms, including provisioning, access models, and cost management
- Own the full lifecycle of shared platform services such as internal PKI, vaults, and Kubernetes operators
- Design and implement disaster recovery: backup/restore, replication, failover design, documented RTO/RPO targets, and regular DR exercises
- Design and publish reusable Terraform/OpenTofu modules for other teams, treating adoption as the success metric
- Own the observability stack and set instrumentation standards for other teams
- Build production tooling in Go or Python (significant software engineering component, not just configuration)
- Mentor engineers through code review, design review, and technical guidance
- Drive down cost and eliminate infrastructure drift
- Participate in on-call rotation for Platform Infrastructure
Your customers are engineers, and the output is code, Terraform configuration, tooling, and automation. You will own complex projects, drive architectural decisions, and set standards other engineers work within.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or related technical field
- 5+ years of professional experience in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or SRE engineering with production ownership
- Deep production Kubernetes experience operating clusters (not just deploying to them)
- Strong Terraform or OpenTofu experience at scale: module design for team consumption, state management, and policy-as-code
- Strong programming ability in Go, Python, or comparable language
- Experience running stateful shared services/infrastructure in production (message brokers, databases, certificate authorities, etc.)
- Deep Linux fundamentals: process and resource behavior, system-level debugging under load
- Understanding of networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, load balancing, service-to-service communication
- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider and ability to work across others
- Sound judgment about blast radius and discipline to make risky changes reversible
- Strong technical judgment, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills
Preferred:
- Experience on an internal platform or developer platform team where users were other engineers
- Experience with Scalr or other IaC platforms, including policy-as-code with OPA
- GitOps with ArgoCD or Flux; Helm, Kustomize, or operator development
- Managing self-hosted CI runners
- Deep understanding of Prometheus/Thanos or equivalent, including writing exporters and instrumentation standards
- Experience with observability platforms, telemetry systems, logging, distributed tracing, and monitoring architectures
- Experience building highly available, multi-tenant SaaS platforms at significant scale
- Proven ability to influence engineering strategy across organizations and mentor technical talent
- Production on-call experience for systems you built
