Staff Engineer

Job Description

Staff Engineer, Cloud & Platform Engineering (Application Modernization - Agentic AI)
Location: Onsite - Grapevine, TX (5 days/week)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Staff: 9 engineers

About the Role
We are seeking a Staff Engineer, Cloud & Platform Engineering to lead and influence the modernization of the technology platform, migrating legacy applications to a cloud-native architecture on AWS. This role is hands-on and strategic, with a strong focus on application modernization, containerization, and cloud-native infrastructure.

As a Staff Engineer, you will play a critical role in modernizing legacy Windows-based applications, building and evolving our application deployment pipelines, and leading migrations to Linux-based, containerized workloads running on AWS EKS. You will partner closely with application teams, DevOps, and leadership to ensure platforms are scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-efficient.

Key Responsibilities
Platform & Infrastructure Leadership

• Lead the design, optimization, and evolution of AWS-native infrastructure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
• Serve as a technical authority for cloud and platform decisions, aligning infrastructure strategy with business objectives.

Agentic AI & Infrastructure Automation:

• Design, implement, and maintain agentic AI systems for self-healing workflows, intelligent capacity planning, automated incident response, and infrastructure-as-code generation.

Application Modernization & Migration

• Lead and support application modernization efforts, including refactoring and replatforming legacy applications.
• Drive migrations from Windows-based environments to Linux-based, containerized architectures.
• Partner with application teams to migrate legacy runtimes (including older .NET frameworks) into container-based deployments on AWS EKS.

Kubernetes & Cloud Operations

• Design, manage, and optimize AWS EKS clusters, including capacity management, performance tuning, and cost optimization.
• Implement and maintain scalable deployment patterns using Kubernetes, autoscaling, and modern cloud-native practices.

CI/CD & Automation

• Design and evolve CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and related tooling to support modern application delivery.
• Leverage Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate provisioning and ensure consistency across environments.
• Utilize Python and other scripting languages to improve automation and operational efficiency.

Incident Management & Reliability

• Lead investigation and resolution of complex cloud and platform incidents.
• Ensure systems meet or exceed performance, reliability, and SLA expectations.

Cost Optimization & Governance

• Partner cross-functionally to identify and implement cloud cost optimization strategies, including use of cloud financial management tools.
• Ensure platform designs follow operational best practices and support long-term maintainability.

Collaboration & Influence

• Work independently while collaborating across engineering, application, and leadership teams.
• Mentor engineers and influence best practices across cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering functions.

Required Qualifications

• Senior/Staff-level experience designing and managing large-scale IT infrastructure in cloud environments.
• Agentic AI Experience: Hands-on experience with agentic AI systems for infrastructure automation (AI-driven runbook execution, LLM-based ops tooling, autonomous remediation pipelines).
  • minimum 3 years of production grade Gen AI & Agentic AI implementations experience on cloud, devops, SRE & platform engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, including services such as EKS, Lambda, and supporting AWS-native tooling.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Proven experience with application modernization and migration projects, particularly replatforming legacy applications.
• Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, and DevOps methodologies.
• Experience using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code to manage cloud environments.
• Solid understanding of Linux-based environments OR strong Windows-to-cloud migration experience with the ability to operate in Linux-based platforms.
• Experience driving cost optimization initiatives using data and cloud financial tools.
• Excellent communication and decision-making skills, with the ability to influence across teams.
• Prior experience supporting retail or e-commerce platforms is strongly preferred.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience migrating applications from Windows to Linux/container-based environments.
• Exposure to .NET application modernization, including legacy frameworks.
• Experience with Karpenter, cloud capacity optimization, and autoscaling strategies.
• Familiarity with InOps / FinOps practices.
• Strong scripting experience (Python preferred).

Why This Role

• Direct ownership and influence over a major enterprise modernization initiative.
• Opportunity to shape how applications are built, deployed, and operated in a cloud-native environment.
• High-impact role working with modern AWS and Kubernetes technologies at scale.

IND123

Meet Your Recruiter

Andrea Lee

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