Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure
Staff Software Engineer designs and scales cloud infrastructure, managing Kubernetes fleets, multi-region recovery, and distributed systems to support massive growth. Requires 8+ years experience with deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, and backend languages like Python/Go/Java.
About the job
What you will do
- Design and implement the next generation of our cloud infrastructure to support a 4x increase in system load, ensuring resilience and performance at scale.
- Own the evolution of our K8s ecosystem, ensuring our core monolith and growing microservices environment remain performant and developer-friendly.
- Leverage your product development background to build infrastructure primitives that make it easier for product teams to ship complex features seamlessly.
- Tackle high-order problems related to global consistency, database contention, and high-throughput background processing.
- Work deeply with infrastructure to manage complex distributed systems that power every Rippling product.
- Drive technical consensus on complex, cross-functional initiatives, acting as a bridge between infrastructure and product engineering.
- Engineer high-efficiency resource strategies, optimizing Kubernetes utilization and AWS spend to ensure our infrastructure scales sustainably with our business growth.
- Act as a force multiplier for the Cloud team, setting the standard for code quality and architectural patterns that will define the next decade of Rippling.
What you will need
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting and scaling infrastructure.
- Background in product development with an understanding that infrastructure exists to empower developers and serve the end-user.
- Deep experience with distributed systems and a strong grasp of where standard architectural patterns break under extreme load.
- Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
- Hands-on expertise with Kubernetes orchestration, including custom controllers, networking, and sophisticated scaling strategies.
- Ability to approach a massive, complex codebase as a fascinating engineering puzzle that requires world-class architectural thinking.
- High proficiency in modern backend languages (Python, Go, or Java), with a desire to master Python and the ability to dive deep into any stack to solve a bottleneck.
Skills
Kubernetes, AWS, Python, Go, Java, Distributed Systems, Microservices
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