Staff Platform Engineer

You will join the Hybrid Platform Engineering track, which builds and operates the compute layer underpinning DeepL's products and research: the Kubernetes control plane, node lifecycle, networking, storage and core cluster services, across both on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Today that spans hybrid infrastructure in Europe - including large on-prem GPU clusters powering DeepL's research and hundreds of on-prem GPU nodes serving production inference - as well as AWS regions across the globe running the product. The track is deepening this hybrid model, unifying how workloads run across on-prem hardware and AWS to give product and research teams a self-service foundation they can build on.

Responsibilities

Take ownership of the reliability, capacity and cost efficiency of DeepL's compute infrastructure, CPU and GPU: the hybrid platform serving our products across AWS and on-prem, and the on-prem clusters powering our research, including their hardware lifecycle; Shape the platform's architecture: bring strong technical positions, weigh them on their merits with your peers, and commit to decisions serving the best outcome; Design, build and operate production-grade Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on-prem infrastructure, taking them from design through to long-term operation; Drive the technical work of deepening the hybrid model - unifying how workloads run across on-prem hardware and cloud, especially AWS and supporting research as it adopts cloud-native technology and ways of working; Define infrastructure-as-code and platform standards that hold across the track, and strengthen observability and security so the platform's behaviour is legible to the teams that depend on it; Mentor engineers across the infrastructure track and raise the technical bar of the group, through design reviews, architecture decisions and the everyday habits that keep the platform maintainable; Build consensus across engineering teams and turn it into shipped change, shaping platform direction at track level; Lead incident response for hybrid infrastructure, driving remediation through to root cause, and help sustain an on-call rotation the team can carry for the long term

Requirements

Deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise: you have designed, built and operated clusters at scale, through their full lifecycle; Depth at scale in either public cloud or on-prem infrastructure, plus the credibility to work in the other. AWS experience is preferred, and bare-metal or data centre experience is strongly valued; Networking and Linux depth you can debug with: you can follow a problem from a container through the host to the network edge; Infrastructure as code with Terraform or equivalent, and GitOps delivery with tooling such as ArgoCD, applied to environments you have owned in production; Software engineering skills in at least one major language, Go or Python preferred, at the level of building tooling other engineers rely on; A track record of technical ownership spanning several teams: you create clarity where a mandate crosses team boundaries, hold clear technical positions, change them on evidence and carry other engineers with you; Strong incident-management and reliability-engineering discipline, and the ownership mindset to build more resilient systems

Nice to have

GPU infrastructure for training or inference at scale; Distributed storage systems in production, such as Ceph; Having served researchers or data scientists as platform customers; Networking at BGP level in a hybrid or on-prem environment

Benefits

Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities; Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication; Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week; Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role; Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally; Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams; 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind; Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package