Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) based in Italy. This role offers the opportunity to shape foundational infrastructure powering large-scale web data products and distributed engineering teams. You’ll own the architecture of core control and context planes that enable services and AI-driven workflows to operate reliably and efficiently. Working across Kubernetes, Kafka, Java, Python, gRPC, and multi-cloud infrastructure, you’ll tackle complex distributed systems challenges at production scale. You’ll establish engineering standards, reliability practices, and service contracts that influence multiple product squads. The role combines hands-on architecture with technical leadership, mentoring, and cross-functional alignment. In a globally distributed, remote-first environment, you’ll have significant autonomy to solve challenging infrastructure problems and influence long-term platform strategy. Accountabilities: - Architect and evolve the control and context planes, advancing service and schema registries, SLO enforcement, health-aware routing, automated canary releases, and operational feedback loops. - Own the service chassis and golden path, maintaining and improving multi-language Java and Python client libraries, standardized workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines. - Define and govern inter-service contracts, including gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution standards. - Operate and improve the core platform infrastructure across Kubernetes, Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx, Confluent Kafka, real-time billing pipelines, Valkey, and database modernization initiatives. - Lead architectural strategy through Requests for Discussion (RFDs) covering workflow orchestration, gateway orchestration, multi-cluster routing, automated failover, and other critical platform initiatives. - Establish reliability engineering practices, including SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, fault isolation, and automated weighted canary deployments.

- Participate in shared infrastructure on-call rotations, lead incident post-mortems, and convert operational insights into platform improvements. - Mentor engineers across multiple squads, review architectural proposals, and establish engineering practices that make reliable software development more consistent and efficient. Requirements: - 10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems, with a strong track record of creating internal platforms or core libraries adopted across engineering organizations. - Advanced Java expertise, including reactive frameworks such as Vert. x or Netty, combined with strong Python proficiency. - Deep experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers, including schema evolution and backward compatibility in mission-critical systems. - Hands-on production experience with Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and event-streaming platforms such as Kafka. - Experience designing automated telemetry pipelines, materialized views, feature stores, or other feedback systems that use production data to dynamically improve system behavior. - Strong reliability engineering background, including SLO/SLI definition, blast-radius analysis, fault tolerance, and rigorous service contracts. - Exceptional technical writing skills and the ability to communicate complex architectural concepts clearly while driving alignment across teams. - Strong written and interpersonal communication skills suited to a globally distributed, remote-first environment. - A curious, continuous-learning mindset with an interest in evaluating new technologies, architectures, and engineering approaches. - Experience with Temporal, DBOS, or similar durable execution platforms is a plus.