Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure

About Pantheon

Pantheon brings together exceptional builders who take ownership, drive meaningful impact, and shape what's next for the web. We power more than 300,000 websites globally for organizations including Google, Princeton, Salesloft, Clorox, and the United Nations. Every day, thousands of developers and marketers use our WebOps platform to build, iterate, and scale WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js sites that reach billions of people worldwide. As an employer, we operate with the same philosophy that drives our product: foundation and freedom. Pantheon is a vibrant, remote-forward team of experts who care deeply about their craft and results. Here, you take ownership of work that matters, contribute alongside exceptional people, and see the impact you create.

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

• 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.

What You Need to Succeed

• 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.

What You Bring to the Table

• 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.

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 [email protected].

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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.