SENIOR PLATFORM ENGINEER
Summary
Senior Platform Engineer at Ahwoo, a video games platform in Auckland, leading production reliability: designing multi-region 99.99% uptime architecture, deployment pipelines, container orchestration, observability, security, and incident response. Stack: .NET in Docker, Railway, GitHub Actions, PostgreSQL/Redis/RabbitMQ, Keycloak, OpenTelemetry/Grafana.
***APPLICATIONS OPEN UNTIL MONDAY 23rd NOVEMBER 2026***
Location: Primarily on-site, Auckland | Type: Full-time
About Ahwoo
Ahwoo.com is a video games platform built in Auckland, New Zealand. We're building it because games deserve better: a platform where players, developers and creators thrive together through transparent systems, shared recognition, and genuine support for the games they love.
We work in the open. Goals and priorities are written down and shared, and engineers and designers work on problems together, not in separate lanes. We research before we commit, ship small versions, and improve them as a team. We keep process light and talk decisions through as a team. The work is wide: one day it's payments infrastructure, the next it's why a news post takes too long to load for players on the other side of the world.
The role
We're hiring a Senior Platform Engineer. You'll lead how Ahwoo runs in production: how we deploy code, how our core services stay up for players around the world, and how we keep them secure. You'll lead the design of the path to 99.99% uptime for our core services and set the long-term direction for deploying code at Ahwoo at scale.
You'll work day to day with a small, fast-moving, multidisciplinary team of engineers and designers. You'll make the platform easier and safer for all of them to build on.
What you'll do
Design and deliver a system that takes our core services to 99.99% uptime with global reach: multi-region topology, failover, redundancy, point-in-time recovery and rapid disaster recovery.
Lead the creation of the long-term vision for how we build, release and deploy code at Ahwoo as we scale, and lead the work to get there.
Develop an engineering culture of resilience, observability, security and platform coherence from the start.
Run and evolve our container orchestration, from local Docker Compose environments to production.
Design and lead the implementation of the systems behind our operations: on-call rotations, incident response and post-incident reviews, capacity planning and cost management.
Own how we keep the platform secure and current: the dependency and image scanning, automated upgrades and vulnerability alerting that catch problems before they reach production.
Write clear documentation, runbooks and architecture decision records that the whole team uses.
Our current stack
.NET services packaged as Docker containers.
Railway for hosting, with deployments and database migrations run from GitHub Actions.
Docker Compose for the local platform environment.
PostgreSQL, Redis and RabbitMQ for data and messaging.
Keycloak for identity.
Cloudflare R2 for object storage.
OpenTelemetry and Grafana with Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Prometheus for observability.
We expect this stack to change. Part of your job is deciding how.
What you'll bring
Experience orchestrating zero-downtime, staggered rollouts for large-scale, stateful clustered services across multi-zone and multi-cloud production environments.
Hands-on experience setting up a cloud organisation from scratch on at least one major provider (Azure, AWS or GCP): account structure, identity and access control, and networking.
Deep knowledge of container orchestration and infrastructure as code, with the judgement to weigh managed services (such as Azure Container Apps or ECS on Fargate) against Kubernetes. Ideally you've led a migration to or from Kubernetes and can explain why it was decided.
Openness to the full range of hosting options, including a long-term plan for us to run our own hardware or VPSs where that makes sense.
A track record of designing highly available, globally distributed systems.
Deep experience with observability: metrics, logs and traces with OpenTelemetry, alerting that's actionable rather than noisy, and dashboards that help people find the cause of an incident quickly. Experience with the Grafana stack is a plus.
A security mindset: you keep dependencies and services current, and you treat vulnerability detection as routine work.
Excellent written and spoken communication. You write documentation people actually read, and you explain trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers alike.
Comfort working in a fast-paced team, balancing long-term platform work against immediate needs.
You're nice to work with: generous with your knowledge, open to feedback, and calm during incidents.
Nice to have
Experience with .NET services in production.
Experience in games or digital distribution.
***APPLICATIONS OPEN UNTIL MONDAY 23rd NOVEMBER 2026***
You must be based in New Zealand and have the right to work in New Zealand.
If this role excites you but you don't tick every box, apply anyway. We think diverse teams build better products and welcome applications from people regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, or any other aspect of your culture or identity.
Hit Apply and if you’re the right fit we’ll be in touch to schedule a chat. Our recruitment process usually involves an online chat, a visit to our office in downtown Auckland, and reference checks.