Platform Engineer

About the Role:
- We are looking for a Platform Engineer with deep expertise in Alibaba Cloud infrastructure.
- You will design, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and highly available cloud platforms and developer tooling.
- You will collaborate closely with software engineering, DevOps, security, and architecture teams to automate deployment pipelines, enforce infrastructure best practices, and build internal developer platforms that empower engineering teams to ship software reliably and efficiently.
- This is a hands-on individual contributor role — not an architect or people-management position.

What You'll Do:
- Design, provision, and maintain enterprise cloud infrastructure on Alibaba Cloud using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.
- Develop and maintain robust CI/CD automation pipelines for continuous deployment, automated testing, and release management.
- Architect and manage containerized environments using ACK (Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes) and Docker, ensuring high availability, scalability, and resilience.
- Implement platform observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions using SLS (Simple Log Service) and CloudMonitor.
- Drive cloud security, identity and access management (RAM), compliance, and governance best practices across all environments.
- Build automated self-service developer tools and platform APIs to accelerate application deployment and engineering velocity.
- Perform cloud cost optimization (FinOps), capacity planning, and architecture refinement to maximize performance and efficiency.
- Collaborate with development teams to troubleshoot complex infrastructure, network, and application deployment challenges.
- Establish operational readiness standards, incident response frameworks, and SRE practices.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation for platform architecture, operational procedures, and automation scripts.

Must-Haves:
- 12+ years of overall experience, with 5+ years in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) — as a hands-on individual contributor.
- Hands-on production expertise in Alibaba Cloud — ECS, ACK, VPC, RAM, and SLS.
- Real project evidence required.
- Kubernetes: ACK specifically.
- Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code — Terraform (Alibaba Cloud provider), Pulumi, or ROS (Resource Orchestration Service).
- Hands-on experience with Docker and containerized environments.
- Demonstrated CI/CD pipeline experience using GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD.
- Proficiency in scripting and programming languages such as Python, Bash, Go, or Shell.
- Solid understanding of cloud networking (VPC, DNS, load balancers, firewalls, VPN) and cloud security practices.
- Strong troubleshooting skills for distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.

Good to Have:
- Alibaba Cloud Certifications (ACP / ACE).
- Experience with Service Mesh technologies and GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux).
- FinOps tools and cloud cost governance strategies.
- Observability experience with Alibaba Cloud SLS, Prometheus, or Grafana.

Requirements:
- Visa-independent candidates only — US Citizen, Green Card, or GC EAD.
- W2 only — no C2C, no 3rd parties.
- 12+ years of experience required.
- Must demonstrate real Alibaba Cloud project experience.

Location: Remote - United States

Skills required for this job:

• CI/CD
• Cloud networking
• Cloud security
• DevOps
• Docker
• FinOps
• GitOps
• Infrastructure as code (IaC)
• Kubernetes
• Observability
• Platform engineering
• Programming
• Site reliability engineering
• Troubleshooting