Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal

Qualifications

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work — whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI’s impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
• 12+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years building production software, with solid experience operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• A track record of leading the design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used broadly by other teams — a relational database service (Postgres or similar), a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar), or a key-value/cache service (Redis/Valkey, etcd, or similar) — including its HA, failover, and operating model.
• Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling: replication topologies, leader election, quorum and consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup/restore and point-in-time recovery, and designing to explicit RPO/RTO and durability targets.
• Strong system design skills — you can reason rigorously about consistency models, partitioning and rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation, and noisy-neighbor mitigation, and communicate the trade-offs clearly to engineers and stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), including its core compute, networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
• Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (including stateful primitives: StatefulSets, CSI/persistent storage, PDBs, topology spread), CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong programming skills in Go (or strong systems-language skills with a willingness to work primarily in Go).
• Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that manage stateful systems (e.g., CloudNativePG, Zalando/Crunchy Postgres operators, Strimzi, Redis/Valkey operators), and opinions on when to adopt versus build.
• Deep expertise in one of the target systems: Postgres internals (WAL, streaming/logical replication, vacuum, connection pooling with PgBouncer/PgCat, major-version upgrades); Kafka/NATS (partitioning, ISR/replication, exactly-once semantics, consumer scaling); or Redis/Valkey (cluster mode, persistence, eviction, hot-key handling).
• Experience running data services across multiple regions or clusters — cross-region replication, failover orchestration, and DR testing.
• Experience with zero-downtime upgrades, schema/data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
• Experience with observability and SLOs for stateful systems — replication lag, saturation, tail latency, error budgets — and with capacity and cost management for shared infrastructure.
• Experience designing multi-tenancy: quotas, isolation, chargeback/showback, and self-service provisioning APIs or CRDs.
• Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS, and secrets management as applied to data services.
• Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), managed data services (RDS/Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.