Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Staff Cloud Platform Engineer to own major parts of the Azure and Kubernetes platform that runs Amperon's product, data pipelines and growing set of AI agents. You'll join our small Infrastructure & Security team, working across infrastructure, site reliability and security, and reporting to the Director of Infrastructure & Security.

🏢 About Amperon

Amperon is the leading energy forecasting company, positioned at the intersection of energy data and AI. Founded in 2018, Amperon has become a trusted partner for power and utility companies, delivering demand, renewable generation, and price forecasts. With cutting-edge predictive analytics, seamless data integrations, and premium customer support, Amperon enables customers to enhance grid reliability and optimize asset performance. Committed to grid modernization, Amperon is the forecasting company of the energy transition.

🎯 The Role

We're hiring a Staff Cloud Platform Engineer to own major parts of the Azure and Kubernetes platform that runs Amperon's product, data pipelines and growing set of AI agents. You'll join our small Infrastructure & Security team, working across infrastructure, site reliability and security, and reporting to the Director of Infrastructure & Security. This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role. Everyone on the team shares ownership of the platform and the on-call. As a Staff engineer, you'll set technical direction for whole areas of it, lead multi-month programs from design to cutover, and raise the bar for how the rest of engineering builds and runs software.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Shape our Kubernetes platform. Run and evolve several AKS clusters (production, workflow, and AI/agent workloads) with Karpenter, Cilium network policy, workload identity, External Secrets, Helm and ArgoCD.
• Lead infrastructure-as-code at scale. Drive our Terraform estate, run through Atlantis: provider upgrades, drift reconciliation, module design and guardrails that keep changes safe, plus the GitHub Actions runners and build pipelines that ship them.
• Make our data stores resilient. Our customers depend on forecasts every hour, so reliable data is core to the product. Operate MySQL Flexible Server and self-managed ClickHouse with resilience first: replication, failover, backup and restore, capacity planning and safe upgrades.
• Build the platform for AI agents. Design isolated, auditable environments for agentic workloads and MCP services, including egress controls, identity and observability, and a self-service path for teams to deploy internal apps safely.
• Make the platform observable. Evolve our observability stack (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo), keep alert rules in code, and make sure we hear about problems before customers do.
• Manage cloud cost. Find and land Azure savings; we have cut tens of thousands of dollars a month and expect more.
• Share the operational load. Join an on-call rotation spread across time zones, so customers and our own engineering teams get help during their working hours. Lead incident response and blameless postmortems, and support data engineering, data science and product teams.
• Multiply the team. Write design docs, review code, mentor engineers, and leave systems documented so no one person is a single point of failure.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years in infrastructure, platform or site reliability engineering, including several years at a senior level owning production systems.
• A track record of leading multi-month infrastructure programs end to end: design doc, stakeholder alignment, phased rollout, cutover and cleanup.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience in production, ideally on a managed offering (AKS, EKS or GKE), including networking and network policy.
• Strong Terraform skills on a large codebase, with GitOps-style workflows (Atlantis, ArgoCD or similar).
• Production experience with at least one major cloud. Azure is strongly preferred; deep AWS or GCP experience with a willingness to go deep on Azure also works.
• Experience operating relational or analytical databases in production (MySQL, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse or similar), including replication, upgrades and recovery.
• Security built into how you work: least privilege, identity-based access over static credentials, secrets management, and network isolation.
• Solid observability practice: metrics, logs and traces (ideally with OpenTelemetry), alerting that people trust, and SLO thinking.
• Comfortable writing Python and shell for automation and tooling.
• Clear written communication. Much of our work happens in design docs, PRs and async threads across time zones.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Running ClickHouse at scale, including clustering and replication.
• Argo Workflows or other high-volume batch and workflow platforms.
• Cilium, Karpenter or Node Auto Provisioning on AKS.
• Experience with AI agents or LLM workloads: sandboxing, egress controls, model gateways, Azure AI Foundry.
• Using AI coding agents (such as Claude Code) as a daily part of your engineering work.
• Compliance programs such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Cloud cost management (FinOps) on Azure.
• Experience in energy, utilities or time-series data platforms.

🎁 Benefits

• Competitive salary plus stock option package. Based on geographical location.
• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• Annual company retreat
• Flexible PTO policy
• Remote work