Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform)

About the Position

At Returnly, we exist for the moments that matter-giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.

We are currently seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Compute Platform) to join our dynamic engineering team. This role is pivotal in ensuring that our infrastructure is accessible to all engineers, which is critical to the success of our business.

Responsibilities

As a member of the Compute Platform organization, you will collaborate with other teams - including Product, Infrastructure, Traffic, Cost & Capacity Engineering to:

• Architect and evolve Returnly's EKS platform, driving strategy across cluster lifecycle, node management, and shared cluster components
• Lead the technical direction for cluster provisioning, upgrades, and teardown through standardized IaC (Terraform, Spacelift) and self-service workflows
• Own the reliability of core shared components across the fleet (Karpenter, CoreDNS, VPC CNI, Kube Proxy, Metrics Server, etc) and the CI/CD pipeline that ships them consistently
• Define and enforce EKS workload safety standards covering resource configuration, workload isolation and blast radius, disruption tolerance (PDBs), Karpenter consolidation strategies, etc
• Build the enforcement and automation path that moves each standard from research and white-glove onboarding through broad adoption to policy-enforced defaults for new workloads
• Establish the observability, baseline audits, and reporting needed to identify hot spots and measure risk mitigation over time
• Partner with cluster-user teams (checkout, batch, ML, analytics, DevProd, etc) to understand workload needs and shape the platform accordingly
• Drive cost and capacity strategy across node scaling, bin packing, and EC2 instance selection
• Mentor engineers across the Compute Platform teams and set the bar for operational excellence
• Participate in the on-call rotation, triage and catalogue runtime K8s issues, and collaborate with SRE on production incidents

Requirements

• Deep EKS and Kubernetes internals expertise, including cluster upgrades, node lifecycle, scheduling, and autoscaling (Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler)
• Demonstrated experience automating Kubernetes operations at fleet scale, from cluster provisioning, upgrades, and node lifecycle to self-healing remediation and policy-driven enforcement, replacing manual toil with auditable, self-service workflows
• Strong grasp of workload reliability patterns: resource tuning, probes, PDBs, topology and isolation constraints
• Experience designing and enforcing platform standards through policy (admission control, OPA/Gatekeeper or equivalent) and automated frameworks
• Infrastructure as Code fluency with Terraform and a GitOps or pipeline-driven delivery model (ArgoCD, kube-applier, or similar)
• Observability instincts: defining SLOs, building metrics, logs, and alerting coverage, and running data-driven baseline audits
• Cross-functional collaboration skills with platform, product, SRE, and capacity teams
• Demonstrated mentorship and technical leadership across teams
• Drive to track emerging Kubernetes community best practices and adapt them to Returnly's needs

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or infrastructure engineering with proven delivery of complex platform solutions
• 6+ years hands-on operating production Kubernetes at scale, ideally EKS on AWS
• Strong cloud-native architecture experience on AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, EKS)
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Spacelift a plus) and GitOps-style deployment pipelines
• Expert-level proficiency in Go or Python and a proven track record building production-grade Kubernetes controllers, operators, and platform tooling that other engineering teams depend on
• Track record designing and enforcing standards across many teams without becoming a bottleneck
• Exceptional problem-solving and systems-thinking skills
• Demonstrated leadership and cross-functional influence
• This position requires either equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

We Offer

• Competitive Salary: USD 236k-325k / year + Equity
• Remote-first with flexibility: Most roles can be done from almost anywhere within the country of employment.
• Health coverage: We cover 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents.
• Spending stipends: Monthly stipends support your tech setup, and the ability to choose health and wellness options that are right for you.
• Time off to recharge: Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars help you rest when you need to.
• Own a piece of what you build: Our employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) lets you buy Returnly stock at a discount.

About the Company

At Returnly, we pride ourselves on our culture across engineering of engaging in thorough technical design review, operational excellence, and capable incident response and analysis. Our mission is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable Kubernetes platform that lets infrastructure and application teams deploy and operate with confidence and minimal operational friction.