Senior Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

CloudZero is growing fast. Our customer base is expanding, the data challenges we're solving are getting more complex, and the platform is scaling to match. As we look to the next evolution of CloudZero's infrastructure, we're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer who can help shape what comes next. You'll own our core messaging and container orchestration platforms, bringing deep technical expertise to decisions that will shape how we build, scale, and operate our infrastructure. You'll have the autonomy to identify opportunities, determine the right solutions, and drive improvements in reliability, performance, and developer experience. Rather than simply maintaining what exists today, you'll help define the foundations our engineering organization will rely on as we continue to grow.

🏢 About CloudZero

CloudZero is the AI ROI Company. We built the financial control plane for AI: the system finance, IT, and engineering use to connect every AI dollar to the outcome it produced. Across every provider. In real time. AI spend is the fastest-growing line on enterprise P&Ls and the least understood. Only 14% of CFOs can prove AI ROI today. CloudZero answers the question no one else can: what did it cost to produce this outcome, for this customer, on this model. The largest cloud spenders on the planet already run on CloudZero, including Coinbase, Duolingo, DoorDash, and Shutterstock. We processed 14 trillion billing events in the last twelve months. We're the first listed partner on Anthropic's cost and usage API. We've raised over $119 million, including a $56 million Series C backed by leading venture capital firms.

🎯 The Role

In this role, you'll lead the operations, scaling, and tuning of our Kafka clusters and Kubernetes environments. Because we leverage Amazon EKS, you won't be bogged down with from-scratch control plane management. Instead, you'll focus on optimizing performance, implementing GitOps best practices, and empowering our engineering teams to ship code and process data seamlessly.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the operations and reliability of our Kafka platform, including deployment, scaling, and topic governance, and define the SLOs for availability and latency
• Administer and optimize our Amazon EKS environments, handling cluster scaling, node group management, namespace provisioning, and overall container resilience
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting for both Kafka and Kubernetes using Sumo Logic to catch bottlenecks before they impact the business
• Partner closely with software engineering teams to help them design reliable, scalable applications that effectively leverage Kubernetes and Kafka
• Manage our cloud environments using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) integrated seamlessly with our GitHub Actions workflows
• Build and maintain our CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure deployments using GitHub Actions, ensuring all configuration changes are version-controlled, automated, and predictable
• On call experience

📌 Required Qualifications

• Production Kafka experience, with a deep understanding of Kafka architecture, broker configuration, topic management, replication, and troubleshooting in high-throughput environments
• A proven track record running containerized workloads in production. Strong experience with any Kubernetes environment is great, whether that's EKS, GKE, AKS, or self-hosted
• Familiarity with core cloud infrastructure concepts (compute, networking, IAM). While we operate on AWS, strong experience with any major cloud provider (GCP, Azure, etc.) is perfectly fine
• Solid experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar Infrastructure as Code tools to manage infrastructure predictably
• Ability to write automation and tooling in Python, Go, or Node, and Bash
• Some experience designing and operating GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions or something similar

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with Kafka ecosystem tools (Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, ksqlDB)
• Experience writing custom GitHub Actions or composite actions
• Experience running stateful workloads and data infrastructure on Kubernetes
• Passion for Developer Experience (DevEx) and optimizing CI/CD workflows to improve engineering velocity

🎁 Benefits

Compensation: $130K – $190K • Offers Equity

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Not specified