Senior Engineer - Cloud Platform
Mode Analytics
Mountain View, CA, USA
USD 100k-120k / year + Equity
About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Engineer to join our Cloud Platform team and take ownership of the architecture and evolution of our multi-tenant SaaS platform. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering and cloud infrastructure, designing and building the systems that power our control plane and data plane at scale.
This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be a technical anchor for the team, driving architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with product and infrastructure leaders to shape the future of our cloud platform.
What You Will Do
Architecture & Design
- Own end-to-end architecture for the cloud platform, spanning control plane and data plane
- Design multi-tenant systems with strong isolation, security, and resource governance
- Define platform abstractions that work across hybrid environments AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premises
- Drive architectural reviews, RFCs, and ensure decisions are well-reasoned, documented, and scalable
Control Plane
- Architect and build systems for tenant provisioning, lifecycle management, and configuration
- Design cluster orchestration and management systems that operate reliably at scale
- Build APIs and automation that enable self-service for operators and tenants
- Ensure control plane is highly available, auditable, and observable
Data Plane
- Design data path components for high-throughput, low-latency workloads
- Build and enforce isolation boundaries between tenants at the data layer
- Optimise for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale
Engineering Excellence
- Set technical direction and coding standards for the platform team
- Identify and address systemic risks — reliability, scalability, security, and operability
- Partner with SRE and DevOps on observability, incident response, and capacity planning
Must Have
SaaS Platform & Multi-Tenancy
- Hands-on experience building or operating multi-tenant SaaS platforms at scale silo/pool/bridge models, noisy neighbour mitigation, tenant resource quotas, and lifecycle automation (onboarding, provisioning, off-boarding)
- Knowledge of data isolation strategies schema-per-tenant, database-per-tenant, row-level security, and per-tenant encryption at rest
Control Plane & Data Plane
- Proven experience with control plane / data plane separation and cluster management — Kubernetes operators, CRDs, admission web-hooks, RBAC, and namespace isolation
- Understanding of configuration management at scale — GitOps workflows, feature flags, and dynamic config propagation across distributed environments
Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure
- Deep expertise in any one of AWS, GCP, or Azure VPC, IAM, managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), and cost optimisation across hybrid environments
- Familiarity with service mesh technologies — Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy — for traffic management, mTLS, and microservices observability
Distributed Systems & Security
- Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals HA patterns, fault tolerance, observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana), and resilience testing
- Understanding of zero-trust security, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)
AI-Augmented Engineering
- Actively uses AI coding assistants — Claude, Cursor, Copilot — for infrastructure tasks, runbook generation, incident analysis, and ADR drafting
- Able to craft effective prompts for complex engineering problems and critically evaluate AI output; evaluates and drives AI tool adoption across the platform team
Good to Have
- Exposure to FinOps practices
- Hands-on experience building and maintaining observability platforms — centralised logging pipelines, metrics dashboards (Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent), distributed tracing infrastructure, and alert management systems that give engineering teams real-time visibility into platform health
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure or platform projects
Compensation & Benefits
In California, the estimated annual salary range for this role is $100K – $120K per year.
Actual compensation may vary and will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, qualifications, experience, and location of the selected candidate.
Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; medical, dental, and vision benefits.