Senior Platform Engineer (Azure)

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer (Azure) for a full-time position (40 hours per week), fully remote in Europe. Our client is a leading multinational company in the building materials industry, based in Germany. The company is a producer of building materials and construction systems, comprising construction materials for drywall construction, plasterboard, cement boards, mineral fiber acoustic boards, dry mortars with gypsum for internal plaster, and cement-based external plaster, as well as insulating materials such as glass wool, stone wool, and other insulation materials. They set the benchmark for gypsum-based products and systems, as well as energy-efficient insulation materials, in terms of market development and customer orientation. With 150 production facilities and sales organizations in over 86 countries, it is one of the big players in the market in Europe, the USA, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

You will architect and operate our client’s cloud-native Data Platform on Azure. You will own infrastructure automation, Kubernetes operations, security, and observability across the platform, while mentoring platform and SRE engineers and partnering with engineering leadership to align the roadmap with business strategy and cost targets. The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, from DevSecOps practices to incident response and platform-wide reliability.

Requirements

• 8+ years in platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE.
• Expertise in cloud-native architectures, with proven Azure cloud delivery.
• Ability to reason about provider-native vs. sovereign trade-offs.
• Strong IaC skills (OpenTofu/Terraform, Crossplane v2) and advanced CI/CD experience (GitHub Actions, Argo CD/Rollouts).
• Deep Kubernetes expertise (AKS), including API gateways, service mesh (Istio ambient), and microservices at production scale.
• In-depth cloud and platform security knowledge: zero-trust with SPIRE/SPIFFE, IAM and RBAC across Entra ID and Okta, policy-as-code (OPA/Gatekeeper), supply-chain security (Sigstore, SBOMs, Trivy), and secrets management (OpenBao, Azure Key Vault, External Secrets).
• Comfort working in DevSecOps-first environments.
• Hands-on experience with observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, optionally New Relic).
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Go, Python, Bash; Rust is a plus).
• Solid networking knowledge across VNets, VPN, Private Link, BGP, and hybrid on-prem-to-cloud connectivity.
• Strong leadership, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration skills.
• Experience with Agile and federated platform setups, including Backstage-style developer portals.
• Ability to drive platform strategy, write architecture decision records (ADRs), and influence enterprise-level technical decisions, from OSS selection to sovereignty trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver cloud-native, self-service platform capabilities across Azure, and partner with engineering leadership to align the Data Platform roadmap with business strategy, cost targets, and the three deployment profiles (non-prod and prod on Azure, plus local).
• Automate infrastructure with IaC (OpenTofu for Day-0, Crossplane v2 for Day-1+) and lead CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) with progressive delivery via Argo Rollouts.
• Drive DevSecOps by embedding SPIRE/SPIFFE workload identity, OPA/Gatekeeper admission, Sigstore signing, and OpenBao/Azure Key Vault secrets management into every layer.
• Operate and scale Kubernetes fleets on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Cilium (L3/L4), Istio ambient mesh (east-west), and Kong (north-south), and ensure high availability.
• Own observability end to end with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Implement FinOps-grade cost attribution, right-sizing automation, and platform-wide SLOs to continuously improve reliability and developer experience.
• Lead incident response and deep-dive troubleshooting to minimize downtime.
• Mentor platform and SRE engineers.
• Evaluate and adopt new technologies (eBPF-native telemetry, confidential computing, PQC migration).
• Champion automation and continuous improvement to eliminate toil and reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).