Staff Platform Engineer

About the Role:

E-commerce infrastructure on the internet is fragmented and broken. Bolt is revolutionizing online commerce by providing a seamless, world-class buying experience for businesses and consumers alike. We’re building a future where retailers can eliminate the massive operational overhead and technical debt associated with online checkout and payments, allowing customers to buy instantly and securely across the internet. We've assembled an incredible team to tackle such a large-scale problem and continue growing selectively.

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will be at the heart of shaping the infrastructure that empowers every engineering team to build, ship, and scale with confidence. You’ll drive critical platform initiatives, lead architecture for core systems, and mentor engineers across teams - all while building secure, resilient, and developer-friendly tools.

This role demands deep technical acumen, cross-functional influence, and a builder’s mindset. If you thrive on designing scalable platforms, solving complex problems, and elevating engineering productivity at scale, we’d love to connect.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and technical strategy for our Kubernetes-based developer platform.

• Design and maintain internal developer platforms (IDPs) that improve CI/CD, observability, and secrets management.

• Own infrastructure as a product — build tools, processes, and systems that improve developer experience and reduce cognitive load.

• Drive security, scalability, and compliance, especially around cloud-native networking, identity, service-to-service communication, PCI-DSS, and SOC2.

• Build and manage infrastructure using Terraform and GitOps principles for consistent, reliable deployments.

• Lead initiatives to consolidate legacy and microservices platforms, define common pipelines, and create shared infrastructure resources (e.g., Docker base images).

• Serve as a technical lead and mentor, collaborating with engineers across platform, SRE, and devops roles.

• Support transition to microservices, including production-readiness, performance, and security.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, security, data, and application engineering teams to ensure alignment and successful adoption of platform solutions.

• Improve system observability by building tools and processes that enhance insight, reliability, and performance across environments.

• Own and improve CI/CD systems, from developer experience to deployment strategies.

• Create and maintain service level objectives (SLOs) and enforce standards for reliability, availability, and performance.

• Champion best practices in infrastructure engineering and act as the point of contact for all things platform within the company.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering roles.

• Expertise in Kubernetes (including Helm) and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform is a must).

• Deep understanding of cloud-native systems and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Multi-cloud experience (AWS + GCP) is a strong plus.

• Experience building CI/CD systems and pipelines, especially using GitOps methodologies.

• Strong knowledge of secrets management, observability (metrics, logs, tracing), and security patterns (e.g., zero-trust, service mesh).

• Proven track record of designing scalable, reliable systems supporting high traffic and mission-critical applications.

• Familiarity with security/compliance needs like PCI-DSS, SOC2, and identity & access control.

• Strong programming skills in Go or Python (Java is acceptable but not preferred).

• Demonstrated ability to lead large-scale cross-functional initiatives.

• Experience working in lean, high-growth startup environments; not just maintaining systems, but building them from scratch.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to influence and align across teams.

• Comfortable mentoring other engineers and contributing to the growth of the platform team.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, payments, or crypto environments.

• Familiarity with ML workloads, data platforms, data lakes, and warehouses.

• Experience building internal tools for developer experience (DX).

• Background in computer science with strong fundamentals in systems design and software engineering.

• Experience aligning platform initiatives with business objectives and compliance needs.

• Comfortable wearing multiple hats (SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure) and switching between tactical execution and long-term strategy.

Our Team’s Coding Standards:

At Bolt, we follow a set of principles inspired by our Tao of Platforms, which emphasizes building simple, modular, and composable systems. As part of our team, you will:

• Design infrastructure and workflows that are easy to understand, maintain, and scale.

• Build modular components with a clear, single responsibility that can be easily combined to form complete solutions.

• Prioritize workflows over technologies, ensuring flexibility and adaptability as new tools emerge.

• Follow version control and codification practices to ensure that infrastructure is immutable and maintainable.

• Mentor and coach engineers on best practices, helping to elevate the team's capabilities and ensuring operational excellence across all projects.