Staff Engineer - Cloud Platform Engineering
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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
About the Role:
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Cloud Platform team and take deep ownership of key platform systems within our multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering and cloud infrastructure — designing, building, and operating the systems that power our control plane and data plane at scale.
This is a high-impact, hands-on role. You will be a technical leader within the team — driving design decisions for significant platform initiatives, growing engineers around you, and partnering with senior engineers and product leads to ship reliable, scalable platform capabilities.
What You Will Do:
Architecture & Design
• Lead architecture and design for significant platform subsystems spanning control plane and data plane
• Design and implement multi-tenant components with strong isolation, security, and resource governance
• Define platform abstractions across cloud environments — AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premises
• Participate actively in architectural reviews and RFCs; contribute well-reasoned, documented design proposals
Control Plane
• Build and evolve systems for tenant provisioning, lifecycle management, and configuration
• Implement cluster orchestration and management workflows that operate reliably at scale
• Develop APIs and automation enabling self-service for operators and tenants
• Ensure your areas of ownership are highly available, auditable, and observable
Data Plane
• Implement data path components for high-throughput, low-latency workloads
• Build and enforce isolation boundaries between tenants at the data layer
• Optimize for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency within your feature areas
Engineering Excellence
• Uphold and contribute to technical standards and coding practices for the platform team
• Identify and address reliability, scalability, and security risks within your scope
• Partner with SRE and DevOps on observability, incident response, and capacity planning
Mentorship & Collaboration
• Mentor and grow mid-level engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing
• Contribute to hiring as an interviewer; help calibrate the bar for platform engineers
• Work closely with cross-geo engineering teams to align on platform direction and delivery
What You'll Bring:
SaaS Platform & Multi-Tenancy
• Hands-on experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms — silo/pool/bridge models, noisy neighbor mitigation, tenant resource quotas, and lifecycle automation (onboarding, provisioning, offboarding)
• Familiarity with data isolation strategies — schema-per-tenant, database-per-tenant, row-level security, and per-tenant encryption at rest
Control Plane & Data Plane
• Experience with control plane / data plane separation and cluster management — Kubernetes
operators, CRDs, admission webhooks, RBAC, and namespace isolation
• Working knowledge of configuration management at scale — GitOps workflows, feature flags, and dynamic config propagation across distributed environments
Cloud & Infrastructure
• Solid hands-on experience with at least one of AWS, GCP, or Azure — VPC, IAM, managed Kubernetes
(EKS/GKE/AKS), IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), and cloud cost awareness
• Familiarity with service mesh technologies — Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy — for traffic management, mTLS, and microservices observability
Distributed Systems & Security
• Good understanding of distributed systems fundamentals — HA patterns, fault tolerance, observability
(OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), and resilience testing
• Awareness of zero-trust security, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and compliance
requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001) at the infrastructure level
AI-Augmented Engineering
• Actively uses AI coding assistants — Claude, Cursor, Copilot — for infrastructure tasks, runbook
generation, and incident analysis
• Can craft effective prompts for engineering problems and critically evaluate AI-generated output
Good to Have
• Exposure to FinOps practices — cost attribution per tenant, showback/chargeback models, and cloud cost anomaly detection
• Experience building or contributing to observability platforms — centralized logging pipelines, metrics dashboards (Grafana, Datadog), distributed tracing, and alerting systems
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or platform projects
What Success Looks Like
In 3 months:
• Solid understanding of the current platform architecture, key systems, and near-term roadmap
• Shipped at least one meaningful improvement to control or data plane with minimal guidance
• Building good working relationships with team members across engineering and product
In 6 months:
• Owning and delivering a significant platform feature or subsystem end-to-end
• Proactively identifying and raising reliability or scalability risks within your area
• Actively conducting interviews and contributing to team hiring
In 12 months:
• Recognized as a strong technical voice on the platform team for your area of ownership
• Delivered measurable improvements to platform reliability, scale, or developer experience
• Mid-level engineers you've worked with showing clear growth in design and execution quality
This job is no longer accepting applications
See open jobs at ThoughtSpot.See open jobs similar to "Staff Engineer - Cloud Platform Engineering" Khosla Ventures.