Staff Engineer, Platform San Francisco, CA

Amplitude is a leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. More than 3,200 customers, including Atlassian, Jersey Mike’s, NBCUniversal, Shopify, and Under Armour, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude guides companies every step of the way as they capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. When teams understand how people are using their products, they can deliver better product experiences that drive growth.

As an organization, we approach challenges with humility, take ownership of our contributions, and embrace a growth mindset that pushes us to constantly improve ourselves, each other, and the value we bring to customers and partners.

Amplitude’s Commitment to Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DEI): Amplitude believes that diversity enables the creation of better products, improves the ability to solve complex problems, and drives more powerful solutions. We strive to create an environment of inclusion—one focused on psychological safety, empathy, and human connection—that will allow employees of all backgrounds to thrive.

About the Role:

We are looking for a highly experienced and collaborative Staff Platform Engineer to join our team. You will be responsible for the design, automation, and optimization of our Kubernetes-based platform, ensuring that it is scalable, easy to use, and reliable. This is a critical role for our company, and we are seeking someone who not only has deep technical expertise in cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes but also values mentoring, collaboration, and open communication. Your work will directly impact our developer productivity by building systems and abstractions that simplify the deployment of new workloads, making it easy for developers to focus on building features, not infrastructure.

In this role, you will help drive a cultural shift in how our Platform team operates, working to create positive relationships across the company, building trust, and making our platform easier to use. We value someone who listens, learns, and communicates effectively while still ensuring high technical standards and reliability.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, implementation, and management of our Kubernetes-based platform, focusing on scalability, developer experience, and system reliability.
• Architect and maintain automation around Kubernetes, ensuring that the platform is easy for developers to use and requires minimal toil to deploy or modify workloads in a self-service model.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (developers, leaders, and other infrastructure teams) to gather requirements, build consensus, and deliver impactful solutions.
• Integrate observability into the platform, using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, and Splunk to monitor system health and performance.
• Drive infrastructure-as-code initiatives using tools like Kubernetes Operators, Helm, Kustomize, and Terraform promoting automation, repeatability, and reliability.
• Ensure that the platform integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines (using Argo CD / Workflows / Rollouts, Github Actions, Jenkins, or similar) and continuously improve developer workflows.
• Contribute to the operational excellence of the platform, including on-call responsibilities and incident management, while building self-healing capabilities where possible.
• Act as a mentor to other engineers on the team, promoting growth and knowledge sharing, ensuring that the team thrives even in the absence of specific individuals.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, empathy, and trust within the team and across departments, helping to bridge gaps between engineering and other business functions.
• Take a hands-on approach to problem-solving, sometimes submitting PRs to resolve issues in codebases or providing detailed solutions when teams need assistance.

What We’re Looking For:

• 8+ years of experience in some combination of cloud-native software development, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, and/or cloud infrastructure, with a more recent focus on Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes and related CNCF projects (e.g., Argo CD/Workflows, Backstage, Envoy, CoreDNS, and more) and in simplifying complex cloud infrastructure for broader teams.
• Operational experience at scale with technologies like Kafka and Airflow.
• Proficient in common infrastructure languages like Golang, Python, and Terraform, with experience developing and operating production systems.
• Extensive experience with AWS cloud infrastructure, networking, and security.
• Proven experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana Cloud, etc.) and a strong understanding of system performance tuning.
• Expertise in building abstractions over Kubernetes to simplify developer interaction with the platform.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across teams, build consensus, and drive initiatives in a high-pressure environment.
• High level of empathy and patience, with a commitment to mentoring and helping others succeed, and the ability to incorporate feedback and turn it into actionable improvements.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automation (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize, etc.), with a focus on reducing toil and operational overhead.
• A mindset focused on improving the developer experience and business alignment, with the flexibility to make decisions that may go against ideal technical preferences when necessary.

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