Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure

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.
• 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.
• Drive security and compliance.
• 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.
• What You Need to Succeed

Requirements

• 8+ years building and operating production systems, with significant time spent on infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering.
• demonstrated experience implementing SRE practices - SLO frameworks, incident management, on-call culture, and measurable reliability improvements.

Preferred

• experience with Grafana, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry in a production environment.

The Role

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.

What You Will Do

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What We Offer

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

Pantheon is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applications from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, or any other classification protected by law. Pantheon complies with federal and local disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation due to a disability for any part of the interview process, please contact talent@pantheon.io

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Visa Sponsorship is not available at this time.

Working At Pantheon From Ireland

This role is based in Ireland and can be performed remotely within the country. Pantheon has a distributed engineering culture — you’ll collaborate primarily with teams in North America and Europe, which means some scheduling flexibility is expected for cross-timezone standups and incident response. Pantheon complies with all applicable Irish employment law including statutory leave entitlements, and compensation is benchmarked to the Irish market.