Senior Software Engineer, Production Engineering

Summary

Join Liftoff's Production Engineering team and take end-to-end ownership of the company's supply infrastructure. You will architect, build, and maintain reliable, large-scale, high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems. Responsibilities include improving tooling and infrastructure to enable multiple daily releases, contributing to an engineering excellence culture, and becoming an expert in cutting-edge open-source technologies. You will also share on-call rotation, ensure minimal Day-2 operations, and mentor team members. Liftoff offers a full compensation package including equity and health/vision/dental benefits, with salary ranges varying by location.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with 5+ years of professional experience, or
• Master’s degree in Computer Science with 3+ years of professional experience, or equivalent experience
• A strong commitment to quality and perfection, with the ability to balance these values with the need to ship products on time
• Strong understanding of computer architectures, system design principles, data structures, and algorithms
• Professional experience in tackling complex programming challenges, preferably but not restricted to Golang
• Professional experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads, including
• Bootstrapping Kubernetes infrastructure
• Writing tooling for the Kubernetes ecosystem
• Experience using Infrastructure as Code to manage and provision resources
• Proven experience in building monitoring solutions for modern microservice architectures
• Knowledge of profiling and debugging distributed microservices
• Excellent team communication and collaboration skills
• Passionate about supporting colleagues and committed to the team’s success
• Fluent in English, with strong proficiency in both written and spoken communication

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end ownership of Liftoff's Supply infrastructure
• Architect, build, and maintain the reliability of large-scale, high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems serving millions of requests per second
• Improve tooling and infrastructure to enable shipping multiple times a day, with a quantified impact on millions of users and our business revenue
• Contribute to an “engineering excellence” culture through state-of-the-art tools, risk-driven testing, explainable systems, and code reviews
• Become an expert in cutting-edge open-source technologies (Kubernetes, Kafka, HAProxy, ArgoCD, etc.) that maximize software development velocity
• Share L1 on-call rotation with other members of the Production Engineering team for systems owned and managed by the team
• Ensure minimal Day-2 operations by focusing on automation, efficient management, and proactive issue resolution
• Mentor and share knowledge with other team members

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience in leading a team
• Proven experience in SRE, DevOps, or Platform Engineering roles
• Experience with multi-cloud computing environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
• Proficient in working with SQL/NoSQL databases (e.g., Postgres, Redis, RocksDB)
• Experience with data lake, lakehouse, and data warehouse architectures
• Familiarity with messaging systems (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka, Spark)
• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines for large distributed systems or backend architectures, preferably within a Kubernetes environment
• Ability to design and optimize infrastructure to support machine learning workflows, including large language models (LLMs), ensuring scalable training, inference, and deployment pipelines
• Experience in building self-serve platforms and a strong track record in driving shift-left adoption
• In-depth understanding of various security standards, protocols, and their implementation details
• Fluency in Mandarin is a plus

Benefits

• Equity
• Health/vision/dental benefits