Lead Software Engineer - Cloud Platform

The Role:

This role offers the opportunity to both shape the future of Shuttle’s cloud platform and backend components and take on a leadership position within the Platform team. You will be responsible for guiding technical direction, managing stakeholder expectations, and driving the development of platform features and operability at scale.

The Shuttle Platform is the foundation that powers how developers build, deploy, and scale applications with Shuttle. It brings together the underlying cloud infrastructure, backend services, and developer experience tooling into a unified system.

Job Description:

70% IC / 30% leadership

1. Technical Contribution: Design, build, test, and evolve the platform with a focus on scalability and production reliability.
   • Contribute directly to the codebase, setting standards for testing, frameworks, and automation.
   • Ship features, promote best practices, and drive workflow improvements across the org.
   • Oversee adoption of best technologies (e.g. Kubernetes) and promote best practices across teams.
   • Apply deep expertise in observability and orchestration to deliver cloud deployment software at scale.
2. Scaling the Platform: Build and optimize systems that enable the Shuttle Platform to serve hundreds of thousands of users.
   • Design, deploy, and operate highly reliable and observable services in production.
   • Apply cloud architecture patterns such as backpressure queues, multi-layer caching, and event-driven streaming to handle load at scale.
   • Build and maintain high-throughput data pipelines that power accurate, real-time analytics.
3. Team Leadership: Lead the Platform team while ensuring the platform meets the needs of the product, other teams and end users.
   • Own planning, resourcing, execution, and future hiring in an agile environment.
   • Build strong stakeholder relationships, guiding decisions and managing cross-team communication and expectations.
   • Champion the use of AI within the team and promote continuous improvement in architecture, design, and workflows.

Must Haves:

• Expertise with at least one major cloud infrastructure provider (AWS or GCP), with 5+ years of hands-on experience.
• Proven ability to design, build, and operate scalable and secure production systems (5+ years).
• Practical experience using Kubernetes in at least one production system at scale.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Pulumi, Terraform), with a clear preference and opinions on effective use.
• Knowledge of CI/CD best practices, with the ability to identify and implement improvements to team efficiency.
• Strong expertise in one of Python, Go, or Rust.
• Able to (at least) read Rust code and review PRs.
• Combined background in DevOps and software engineering.
• Demonstrated leadership experience, having managed small teams of at least 2–3 engineers.

Bonus points:

• Hands-on Rust development, either in open-source projects or commercial environments.
• A polyglot engineer.
• Experience as a senior engineer within a startup or scale-up team.
• Direct experience building or operating a Platform as a Service (PaaS).
• Contributions to widely recognised open-source projects.