Staff Platform Engineer

📣 Staff Platform Engineer in Eindhoven: own the platform's technical direction, drive reliability, security, and developer experience for 30k+ merchants. 📈

The Platform domain is the foundation everything else runs on — an AWS-native SaaS platform processing millions of parcels every day. As a Staff Platform Engineer, you own the technical direction for the infrastructure and developer experience layer that thousands of European e-commerce businesses depend on. You design the systems, set the standards, and make the engineers around you ship better, faster, and more reliably. When something breaks at scale, you're one of the people who figures out why — and makes sure it never happens the same way again.

🚀 This is what you tell people at parties

We didn't become Europe's leading e-commerce shipping platform by playing it safe. Sendcloud powers 30,000+ online retailers, marketplaces, and fulfillment companies, helping them ship smarter, grow faster, and actually get shit done for their customers. We're building the platform that solves shipping, at scale, globally.

🧐 The Role

Role Description

Platform at Sendcloud is structured around two focused teams. Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure — EKS, VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, and Terraform modules — the engine room everything runs on. Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer — CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, observability tooling, and DORA metrics — the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely.

• As the Staff Platform Engineer, you're the senior individual-contributor anchor of the Platform domain, sitting at the intersection of technical excellence, cross-team enablement, and strategic delivery.
• You don't just solve problems — you define which problems are worth solving, with impact measured by the collective output, platform health, and engineering velocity of the teams you influence, not by what you personally ship.
• This is a destination role, not a stepping-stone into management — built for engineers who want to stay deeply technical while operating at real organisational and strategic scope.
• You partner closely with Engineering leadership and Principal Engineers to set and drive the technical direction of the Platform domain.

🎯 What you'll do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and own the technical strategy for cross-cutting platform capabilities: infrastructure reliability, observability, progressive delivery, security controls, and developer experience tooling.
• Lead architectural decisions across Foundation and Developer Platform, ensuring choices are traceable to business outcomes and reviewed with Principal and Staff Engineers.
• Drive platform-wide engineering standards: IaC module architecture, Kubernetes operational patterns, SLO/SLI frameworks, observability baselines, and zero-trust security controls.
• Evaluate and own strategic technical decisions, from the Aurora PostgreSQL migration and AWS Graviton adoption to Okta IAM consolidation and OAuth2 standardisation.
• Proactively identify and remediate systemic technical debt — particularly where it creates delivery risk, blocks commercial goals, or threatens platform reliability.

Cross-Team Delivery

• Scope, plan, and lead large platform initiatives spanning multiple teams with ambiguous or evolving requirements, such as Progressive Delivery rollout and Domain-Based IaC restructuring.
• Own technical delivery of post-mortems with cross-team root cause, ensuring lessons are shared organisation-wide and action items are closed within SLA.
• Participate in the on-call rota, serving as a senior technical presence in high-severity incidents and owning resolution end-to-end where needed.
• Contribute to Peak Season preparation, capacity planning, and other organisation-wide technical programmes.
• Participate in the Engineering Hiring Interviewer Pool and help raise the technical bar for platform engineering hires.

Enablement & Multiplier Effect

• Act as a force multiplier — your primary success metric is the collective output and capability of the teams you influence, not your individual code contribution.
• Mentor Senior Engineers across both Platform teams in cloud architecture, Kubernetes operations, reliability engineering, and platform thinking.
• Produce and maintain high-quality internal artefacts — runbooks, design docs, ADRs, and golden paths — that reduce tribal knowledge and raise the engineering floor.
• Champion the Platform as a Product mindset: validate standards with engineering teams before mandating them, and ensure tooling makes compliance achievable before enforcement begins.

Engineering Culture

• Model blameless but accountable engineering: lead post-mortems with genuine curiosity, drive follow-through on action items, and hold crucial conversations when needed.
• Co-own the DORA metrics baseline and improvement with Developer Platform, using data to drive engineering-wide conversations about delivery health.
• Proactively communicate platform risks, constraints, and opportunities to Engineering Managers and domain leadership — surfacing what's invisible to others before it becomes a crisis.

✅ What you bring to the table

Personally

• You think in systems, not tickets — you ask "what problem are we really solving?" before writing code or Terraform.
• You are a calming force in incidents and complex cross-team debates — you disagree and commit, and you model that behaviour for the engineers around you.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity: you scope large initiatives when requirements are unclear, and help others do the same.
• You treat documentation and knowledge sharing as first-class engineering work, not an afterthought.

Professionally

Must have

• 7+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with at least 3 years operating at senior or staff level in a platform, infrastructure, or SRE function.
• Deep AWS expertise: EKS, VPC/networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, WAF, KMS, and Lambda — you understand the stack Sendcloud runs on.
• Production-grade Kubernetes: Helm, Karpenter, Envoy Gateway, KEDA, Kyverno, workload patterns, RBAC, and cluster operations at scale.
• Infrastructure as Code mastery: Terraform modules, composition, and state management, with extensive experience designing modules and applying best practices at scale.
• CI/CD and progressive delivery: GitLab CI, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts (canary, blue-green), pipeline design, and change failure rate reduction.
• Observability as a discipline: Datadog (APM, dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, scorecards, log configuration), DORA metrics, and the ability to define what healthy looks like for a platform service.
• Security thinking embedded in daily work: IAM hygiene, zero-trust principles, secrets management, JIT access, OAuth2/OIDC, audit logging, and compliance readiness (SOC2, GDPR).
• Proven track record of owning and delivering complex, cross-team technical initiatives from problem framing to production — not just contributing to them.
• Strong written and verbal English: you can write a compelling ADR, present trade-offs to a non-technical stakeholder, and give direct technical feedback in a code review.

Strong advantage (nice to have)

• Experience with platform engineering in a SaaS scale-up context — you understand the difference between building for a startup and operating a platform with enterprise-grade commitments.
• Hands-on experience with developer experience tooling: Internal Developer Portals, golden paths, developer self-service, and measuring adoption.
• FinOps awareness: cost-per-service thinking, Graviton/ARM adoption, reserved instance strategy, and the ability to articulate infrastructure ROI.
• Event-driven architecture experience: NATS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar in high-throughput, multi-tenant environments.
• Experience with AI/LLM governance in an engineering context: centralised API gateways, cost controls, data privacy safeguards, and GDPR-compliant usage patterns.

❤️ Our Values

• 💩 No bullshit: Big egos suck. Be open, honest and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don't just talk about problems, solve them.
• 🎯 Grow & win: Be highly curious, adaptable & proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours.
• 🎠 Have fun: Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you're the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze, enjoy the ride.