Staff Platform Engineer

Level: 4
Salary band: $150,000-$190,000
Bonus: 10% performance-based, discretionary
Location: Hybrid – work in our Cambridge, MA office up to 3x/wk

We’re looking for a Staff Platform Engineer based in Boston to join our Boston Engineering Team to develop and support the running of our infrastructure and platform at the edge.

Our mission is to build lab automation products at the intersection of hardware and software in the life-sciences automation space that can transform the industry, accelerating science.

About the team

Our engineers are more than just technically skilled; they’re driven by curiosity and a growth mindset. They find immense joy in seeing the software power the robots and the hardware bench, transporting plates from instrument to instrument. They understand the profound impact of their work on the life sciences industry, and this fuels their passion.

The core skills we’d like to see:

• Deployment on AWS to IoT Greengrass, ECS, Lambda and EKS, with infrastructure managed via Terraform and pipelines via CircleCI
• Infrastructure as code management of SQL and NoSQL databases, Python and React applications
• Kubernetes and Docker for running our applications
• Python for our application code, APIs and SDK, and scripting
• Observability platform via Datadog
• Feature flags to enable us to experiment and control when we release new features to customers

We are flexible and look for the right folks. You are not expected to know everything, but here are some other of our core technologies and what our environment looks like:

• Event-driven architecture, employing technologies such as NATS, Kafka, gRPC and Protobuf for event definitions
• SQL and NoSQL databases: PostgreSQL, Couchbase, DynamoDB
• Observability platforms; Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus
• Feature flags to enable us to experiment and control when we release new features to customers
• Comfortable with scripting languages such as Python, Bash, Go

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Standardization: Establish consistent environments and processes across the organization to reduce complexity and improve reliability.
• Automation: Implement automation in provisioning, deployment, and scaling to minimise manual intervention and reduce errors.
• Scalability: Design systems that can handle increased loads seamlessly, ensuring performance remains optimal as demand grows.
• Developer Productivity: Provide tools and environments that allow developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure.
• Security and Compliance: Embed security best practices and compliance requirements into the platform to protect data and meet regulatory standards.
• Taking pro-active pragmatic approaches and keeping it simple by solving for problems that we have, not for problems we might encounter.

What it takes:

• Technical leadership and code excellence with the ability in developing high-quality code, conduct code reviews and lead technical initiatives through strong architectural understanding, mentorship, and the capacity to align team objectives with strategic technical vision.
• Team multiplier and collaborative problem solver who contributes to up-skilling the team, helping to resolve issues, sharing knowledge, and elevating others around you.
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity, thinking through the problem space, shaping the product, seeking feedback, and adjusting the product through iterations.
• Production experience across the core technology stack of React and Typescript in an AWS environment, ideally working on data-intensive edge applications, microservices and event-driven architecture. We also welcome diverse experiences in other languages such as Python, Golang, Rust, or Dart.
• Delivery-focused and pragmatic in ensuring customer value is delivered efficiently, with necessary trade-offs considered, balancing strategic direction, quality and resiliency.
• Have a product mindset, always keen to understand customer needs. Participate in product and design discussions, contributing ideas to ensure we do the most impactful work that will improve the product and user experience.
• Effective stakeholder management in supporting customer engagement and navigating teams through incidents and customer support cases.

US team benefits:

Healthcare 🩺
Competitive healthcare for you and your family

401k 💰
We offer a 401(k) retirement savings plan

Well-being budget ☀️
Invest in your own well-being, personal growth, and hobbies

Holiday 🏖
30 days + 8 public holidays

Additional leave days ☺️
Time off for dependents, ‘Me days’, birthdays and volunteering days off

Birthday trees 🌳
Planting a tree for every employee on their birthday, every year

Paid sick leave 🏥
10 days paid sick leave to stay home and focus on rest and recovery

Mental health support 🧠
Access the therapy for you and your family through Spill

Career progression frameworks 💫
Each department & discipline has a progression framework