Staff Cloud Engineer

The Opportunity at Altana

The Cloud Engineering team is looking for an experienced Staff Cloud Engineer to help build out our vision. You'll work closely with our Developers, Data Scientists, and Customers on projects to analyze and observe world-scale datasets, build systems that can scale to produce never-before-seen insights, and construct infrastructure and applications that help deliver our product vision.

In this role, you will be instrumental in ensuring the availability, performance, and scalability of Altana's critical production services across our cloud-native environments and data pipelines. You will drive reliability into our architecture and operations through automation, proactive monitoring, and comprehensive observability. Success will be measured by the resilience of our production systems, the effectiveness of our observability stack, and our continuous improvement in operational efficiency.

Your Responsibilities

• Observability & Monitoring: Design, implement, and maintain comprehensive observability solutions across the platform stack, including metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting using modern tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry). Develop dashboards and runbooks that provide deep insights into system health and behavior.
• Internal Developer Platforms: Build and maintain internal developer platforms using infrastructure as code (Terraform) to enable self-service provisioning across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure).
• Automation & CI/CD: Design and implement automation pipelines for infrastructure provisioning, application deployments, and operational tasks using GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or similar tools.
• Kubernetes & Container Platforms: Develop and maintain Kubernetes platforms including writing Helm charts, managing cluster operations, implementing pod security policies, and optimizing resource utilization.
• Reliability Engineering: Champion SRE principles including establishing and monitoring Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for critical services. Drive initiatives to improve system reliability, availability, performance, and efficiency.
• Platform Abstractions: Create platform abstractions and tooling that enable development teams to deploy and operate services independently while maintaining security and compliance standards.
• Security & Compliance: Build and maintain secure container images and deployment pipelines with automated security scanning, vulnerability management, and compliance checks. Support deployments in highly regulated customer environments.
• Incident Management: Participate in incident response lifecycle including detection, triage, mitigation, and resolution. Lead blameless postmortems to identify root causes and implement preventative measures.
• Toil Reduction: Automate operational tasks to reduce toil and improve system reliability through scripting, tooling development, and process improvement.
• Collaboration & Mentorship: Collaborate with engineering teams to understand their needs and translate them into platform capabilities. Mentor team members on cloud best practices, platform patterns, and automation techniques.
• On-Call Rotation: Participate in a periodic on-call rotation, responding to critical alerts and ensuring rapid resolution of production incidents.

About You

• 5+ years of experience building developer platforms, infrastructure automation, or cloud infrastructure in a production environment.
• Expertise in designing, implementing, and managing observability platforms for cloud-native environments (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK stack, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger).
• Strong understanding and practical application of SRE principles, including SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction, and blameless culture.
• Production experience building and operating environments in AWS and/or Azure.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform, OpenTofu, or similar tools.
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience including cluster management, application deployments, and operational maintenance.
• Proficiency in at least one programming/scripting language (e.g., Python, Go) for automation and tool development.
• Proven experience participating in and improving incident management processes for critical systems.
• Knowledge of modern software delivery paradigms, including microservices architectures and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and troubleshooting skills in complex distributed systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, comfortable working with technical teams to understand requirements and design solutions.
• Track record of delivering platform capabilities that improved team productivity or system reliability.
• Care deeply about developer experience, automation, security, and operational excellence.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a startup or high-growth technology company.
• Experience with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux).
• Familiarity with securing information systems and compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, IRAP, SOC 2).
• Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).
• Experience with data engineering concepts, including building or operating reliable data pipelines, data streaming technologies, or managing large-scale data infrastructure.
• BS or MS degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

Technologies We Love

• Languages: Python, Go, JavaScript
• Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Azure
• Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
• Data: Databricks, OpenSearch, Postgres, Spark

This role can be fully remote or based in New York City, Washington D.C., or the San Francisco Bay Area with an expectation of hybrid work or occasional travel as needed.

US Salary Range and Benefits

$170,000 - $220,000

 The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position.  The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.