Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure at Pantheon Platform in Ireland (Remote)

Job description

• The Platform Infrastructure Engineering (PIE) team is the foundation that lets every engineering team at Pantheon move fast, safely. We build the patterns, templates, and tools that power a self-service developer experience - and we're responsible for the reliability and observability standards Pantheon's entire internal platform depends on.
• We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer with a strong SRE orientation to take our platform reliability practice to the next level. Today, reliability is distributed and inconsistent across teams. This role exists to change that - establishing Site Reliability Engineering as a first-class discipline within our group and setting the patterns that 15+ engineering teams will use to ship quickly and safely for years to come.
• In the short term, the focus will be on building and finalizing our new internal Service Foundation platform - meeting strict compliance requirements while making it easier, more reliable, and quicker to ship. Long term, as that foundation matures, the focus shifts toward SRE best practices: formalizing SLO/SLI frameworks, incident response culture, and reliability engineering across the organization. You'll be a technical voice not just within PIE, but across the broader Internal Platform Group - working with adjacent teams to drive alignment and raise the bar.
• The new platform runs on Go, GCP primitives (Cloud Run primarily, with GKE being strategically used), Terraform, and a Grafana-centered observability stack.
• Pantheon's core values are Trust, Teamwork, Passion, and Customers First. Within engineering, we value collaboration, character, autonomy, and a no-blame culture.

Responsibilities

• Establish SRE as a discipline. Define and drive adoption of SLO/SLI frameworks, reliability standards, and incident response practices across PIE and the broader Internal Platform Group. Build a quieter, more reliable internal platform.
• Set the observability standard. Own and evolve our observability patterns - Prometheus metrics, OpenTelemetry tracing, and structured logging - so every team has clear, actionable signals. Observability is a first class citizen here.
• Build and maintain the paved path. Design and deliver the service templates, Terraform modules, and infrastructure patterns that make success easy: Go APIs, CLIs, Cloud Run services, and GKE workloads that come with reliability and observability built in from day one.
• Default to GCP primitives. Contribute to key strategic initiatives - migrating to GCP Secret Manager, standardizing on GitHub Actions and Cloud Build, moving to Cloud SQL - by establishing GCP-native managed services as the default for scaling. Help the organization move away from self-hosted complexity as the default, and toward primitives that reduce operational burden.
• Drive security and compliance. Apply security-first thinking to networking and identity - IAP, IAM, VPC design - and support compliance posture across SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and other frameworks.
• Mentor the team. Guide engineers in designing and implementing high-impact reliability and infrastructure work, raising the technical bar across PIE and adjacent teams.
• Own the full lifecycle. Operate in a full DevOps model - development, testing, operations, and support for the systems you build.
• Participate in on-call. After an initial ramp period (typically 3-6 months), join on-call rotation and actively contribute to reducing its burden through better automation, runbooks, and reliability work.

Requirements

• Site Reliability Engineering principles: deep understanding of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, toil reduction, and how to operationalize these practices in a team that hasn't had them before.
• Cloud infrastructure: hands-on expertise with GCP services - Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud SQL, GCP Secret Manager, IAP/IAM, networking - with a strong bias toward managed and serverless over self-hosted.
• Observability: practical experience designing and implementing all three observability pillars (metrics, traces, logs) using Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and structured logging. Grafana is our first-class observability platform - practical experience in turning signals into actionable reliability improvements, not just pretty graphs.
• Infrastructure as code: strong Terraform skills, including module design for reusability and adoption across teams.
• Security mindset: security is foundational, not a checkbox - IAM least-privilege, IAP, network controls, secrets management, and compliance requirements inform how you build.
• Technical leadership: experience setting technical direction for a platform or team, translating ambiguous reliability goals into concrete architecture, and influencing engineers who don't report to you.
• Platform engineering philosophy: you think in patterns and self-service - you'd rather give teams a great pattern or template than solve their specific problem for them.
• Communication: clear and direct - you can articulate reliability risk, architectural decisions, and incident postmortems to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience: 8+ years building and operating production systems, with significant time spent on infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering.
• SRE track record: demonstrated experience implementing SRE practices - SLO frameworks, incident management, on-call culture, and measurable reliability improvements.
• Go proficiency: strong hands-on Go (Go 1.21+); Python as a secondary language.
• GCP expertise: deep, practical experience with GCP - Cloud Run, GKE, IAM, networking, and GCP-native managed services. Other comparable cloud environments are considered with clear GCP ramp willingness.
• Terraform: hands-on experience building and maintaining Terraform modules, not just running plans.
• Kubernetes: solid operational experience with GKE or equivalent Kubernetes platforms. Our existing hosting infrastructure runs heavily on GKE, so this isn't optional - but for new platform work, you default to Cloud Run and managed services first.
• Observability tooling: experience with Grafana, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry in a production environment.
• Security and networking: practical experience with IAP, IAM, VPC design, and operating within compliance frameworks (SOC 2, PCI DSS, or similar).
• Template and paved-path mindset: experience building reusable infrastructure patterns or developer platforms, not just one-off solutions.
• Team mindset: you measure success by what your team and the broader organization achieves, not by your individual output.

Skills

Required

• Communication: clear and direct
• Go (Go 1.21+)
• Python (secondary)
• Kubernetes (GKE or equivalent)

Benefits

• We have all the usual perks and benefits, but what we can really offer you is a fantastic work environment powered by an amazing team.
• Industry competitive compensation and equity plan
• Robust vacation package with 28 days of holiday
• Private medical and dental coverage
• Life and critical illness insurance
• Attractive workplace pension scheme
• Access to Employee Resource Platform
• Top-of-line equipment
• Monthly allowance for wellness, reading, and access to LinkedIn Learning for continued development
• Events and activities, both team-based and company-wide, that inspire, educate, and cultivate