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Salary: USD 250,000 - 285,000 / annual
Cortex is an Engineering Operations Platform that provides visibility, governance, and golden paths for AI-augmented software development. The company is a YC-backed, Series C-funded startup (raised $60M led by Scale Ventures) with ~80 employees, used by companies like Rapid7, Xero, BigCommerce, and Skyscanner.
As Staff Platform Engineer, you will own and define the architecture of Cortex's infrastructure and platform layer. This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on foundational platform work that enables the company to scale reliably and securely.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define architecture and best practices for the platform and infrastructure layer
- Own the deploy pipeline and lead migration to GitOps (Argo) for fast, safe releases
- Design and harden multi-tenant isolation and blast-radius protection, including the path to dedicated/single-tenant deployments
- Lead database stabilization and platform work behind performance, availability, and safe migrations
- Build infrastructure foundations for compliance-heavy and government deployments (encryption, authentication, boundary and data-flow design)
- Set standards for observability, on-call, and operational readiness across engineering
- Collaborate with leadership and product to translate platform capabilities into customer-facing offerings
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, operating, and scaling high-performance production systems
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
- Strong database proficiency (Postgres) with experience in performance, availability, and migrations at scale
- Architectural judgment at system and cross-team level
- Working proficiency in at least one application language (JVM preferred)
- Strong security mindset (IaC, secrets management, least privilege, appsec)
- Fluent, critical use of AI in day-to-day engineering
- Excellent communication and proven track record of setting technical direction
Plus factors: FedRAMP/FISMA experience, hyper-growth startup background.
The company is fully remote and welcomes candidates from anywhere in the US, with all-company offsites a few times per year.
