Staff Platform Engineer

Who are you

We are looking for a motivated Staff Platform Engineer to join our DevOps and Cloud team based in Lisbon.
 
Staff Platform Engineer professionals are highly specialized IT professionals who help organizations define, build, and evolve internal developer platforms that improve the way engineering teams deliver software. They combine strong engineering depth with a platform-as-product mindset, helping teams move faster, more safely, and with less friction.
 
This is a hands-on engineering leadership role with significant scope. The successful candidate will help define the direction of our internal developer platform, guide the adoption of golden paths, improve developer experience, and support the platform engineering team in growing ownership across platform capabilities, automation, observability, and developer enablement.
They may also be called upon to provide guidance on how to best use specific tools, technologies, and operating models to improve platform adoption, reliability, and engineering productivity.

The main responsibilities of the successful candidate include:

• Platform Vision and Roadmap: Define and evolve the vision for the internal developer platform, including what capabilities should be built, adopted, standardized, or intentionally left out of scope. Work with engineering leadership and the platform engineering team to translate this direction into a clear roadmap, practical priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Internal Developer Platform: Lead the design and evolution of internal developer platform capabilities that improve how engineering teams build, deploy, operate, and understand their services. Support the adoption of platform tools such as Backstage, Humanitec, Port, or equivalent approaches where relevant.
• Golden Paths and Developer Workflows: Define reusable service templates, opinionated defaults, paved roads, and development workflows that help engineering teams deliver services consistently. Decide where standardization is required and where flexibility is appropriate, while enabling the platform engineering team to implement and improve these patterns over time.
• Developer Experience: Make developer experience a first-class concern across the platform. Work with engineers to identify developer pain points, improve onboarding flows, documentation, APIs, CLIs, templates, internal tooling, and support models.
• Developer Experience Measurement: Establish mechanisms to measure platform success through developer outcomes, adoption, reliability, and reduced friction. Use approaches such as DORA metrics, the SPACE framework, internal developer feedback, developer interviews, and platform adoption metrics to guide prioritization.
• Platform API and Operating Model: Define the contract the platform exposes to product engineering teams, including platform abstractions, service expectations, escalation paths, support boundaries, and the split of responsibility between platform teams and service teams.
• Observability and Reliability Enablement: Bring strong fluency in observability and reliability practices so the platform can provide clear visibility, useful service health signals, and better operational standards. Partner with the platform engineering team and product engineering teams to improve telemetry quality, dashboards, operational readiness, and service expectations.
• Mentorship and Enablement: Mentor platform engineers and help develop their platform-thinking depth alongside their technical implementation skills. Create opportunities for engineers in the team to grow ownership in areas such as developer experience, golden paths, automation, observability, platform adoption, and developer enablement.
• Engineering-wide Influence: Partner with engineering leadership, product engineering, security, and operations teams on broader engineering improvements where the platform can reduce friction, improve consistency, and increase delivery confidence.
• Stay updated: Stay current with emerging technologies and trends in platform engineering, internal developer platforms, developer experience, cloud-native tooling, DevOps, observability, and infrastructure automation.

What can you bring to the table?

Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. Master's degree preferred.

Experience: At least 8 years of engineering experience, with at least 4 years of experience building internal developer platforms, platform capabilities, cloud-native platforms, or developer tooling at scale.

Technical Skills:

• A proven track record of designing, building, and evolving platform capabilities used by engineering teams in production environments.
• Strong platform-as-product mindset, with experience treating developers as internal customers through feedback loops, roadmap discipline, service expectations, and measured outcomes.
• Proven experience with internal developer platform concepts and tools such as Backstage, Humanitec, Port, or equivalent platform approaches.
• Experience designing golden paths, including reusable service templates, standardized workflows, opinionated defaults, documentation, and onboarding experiences.
• Strong expertise across the modern platform stack, including Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and observability.
• Strong developer ergonomics judgment across APIs, CLIs, error messages, documentation, onboarding flows, service templates, and internal tooling.
• Experience defining platform operating models, including ownership boundaries, escalation paths, support models, adoption mechanisms, and service expectations.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture, container platforms, infrastructure automation, and DevOps practices.
• Experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform or similar tools.
• Demonstrated experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools such as Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
• In-depth knowledge of monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, or similar platforms.
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex issues across infrastructure, platform, deployment, and developer workflow layers.
• Experience influencing engineering teams without relying only on direct authority, using technical credibility, clear communication, documentation, and pragmatic decision-making.
• Demonstrated ability to integrate security, reliability, scalability, and cost-awareness into platform design and implementation decisions.

Nice to have:

• Experience significantly changing, sunsetting, or replacing an internal platform or major platform capability that was not delivering value.
• Background in a developer-tools, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or cloud-native product environment where developer experience and adoption were key success measures.
• Experience contributing to or extending tools such as Backstage, Crossplane, Kubernetes operators, Terraform modules, or similar platform tooling.
• Experience facilitating workshops with product engineering teams to identify pain points, platform gaps, developer friction, and unmet needs.
• Experience implementing developer experience measurement using DORA metrics, SPACE framework, internal developer NPS, platform adoption metrics, or similar approaches.
• Experience scripting and programming, with proficiency in languages such as Python, Go, Shell, Java, or .Net.
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, tracing, and service health solutions to enhance observability and troubleshoot issues proactively.
• Project management: As a Staff Platform Engineer, you may be responsible for overseeing the implementation of platform initiatives. This may include aligning stakeholders, coordinating technical delivery, supporting prioritization, and ensuring initiatives deliver measurable outcomes.
• Problem-solving: Platform teams often solve complex technical and organizational problems. The successful candidate should be able to identify root causes, balance trade-offs, and propose practical solutions that improve both engineering delivery and operational reliability.
• Business analysis: A Staff Platform Engineer may work with software developers, engineering managers, product managers, security teams, operations teams, and other IT specialists. They should be able to understand engineering needs, translate them into platform capabilities, and evaluate the expected impact of platform investments.

To be successful in this role, we are looking for somebody who:

• Has excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment.
  Is able to work effectively as part of a team, contributing to the team dynamic and resolving conflicts constructively.
• Is a champion of continuous improvement.
• Shows initiative in tackling problems.
• Is comfortable making opinionated technical decisions and defending them, while remaining open to changing direction when evidence supports it.
• Measures platform success through developer outcomes, adoption, reliability, and reduced engineering friction, not only by platform-team output.
• Communicates platform direction clearly through written documents, decision records, roadmap narratives, and technical proposals.
• Brings a service mindset and believes internal customers deserve the same care as external customers.
• Leads through clarity, mentorship, and enablement, helping engineers on the platform team grow ownership rather than centralizing all decisions.
• Is fluent in English, while any other language, particularly Portuguese, is a plus.