Staff Engineer (Core & MLOps) - Remote

Lisbon Portugal•TELECOMMUTE•Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Remote

Senior

Full Time

remotestaff engineerbackenddistributed systemskubernetesjavapythonmlopsgrpcterraform

Requirements

•10+ years of experience building scalable distributed backend systems with internal platforms or core libraries adoption.
•Expertise in Java with reactive frameworks like Vert.x or Netty and strong proficiency in Python.
•Deep experience with gRPC and Protobuf including schema evolution and backward compatibility.
•Hands-on infrastructure expertise with production Kubernetes at scale, Terraform, and Kafka event streaming.
•Experience designing automated telemetry pipelines and feedback loops for system behavior adaptation.
•Proven success defining SLOs/SLIs, analyzing blast radius, and designing fault-tolerant systems.
•Exceptional technical writing and leadership skills to drive technical alignment across teams.
•Strong interpersonal and written communication skills for a globally distributed remote-first environment.
•Passion for continuous learning and evaluating new tools, architectures, and techniques.

•Architect the control and context planes, advancing the control plane into a robust production substrate and designing the context plane for automated feedback loops.
•Own the service chassis and golden path, maintaining multi-language client libraries, workload specifications, Helm charts, and deployment pipelines.
•Define inter-service contracts including gRPC and Protocol Buffer definitions, API gateway transcoding, versioning policies, and schema evolution rules.
•Operate the platform substrate partnering with infrastructure engineers to run Kubernetes, Terraform, HAProxy/Nginx, Confluent Kafka, real-time event-billing pipelines, and database modernizations.
•Drive architectural strategy via Requests for Discussion (RFDs) on critical platform initiatives.
•Institutionalize reliability engineering by establishing SLOs and error budgets, implementing health-aware traffic isolation and automated canary deployments.
•Share production ownership by participating in on-call rotation, leading incident post-mortems, and improving platform based on operational lessons.
•Elevate engineering standards by mentoring engineers, reviewing system proposals, and establishing best practices for reliable software development.

•Hands-on experience with durable execution engines like Temporal or DBOS.
•Experience in MLOps including model serving, performance monitoring, and drift detection.
•Familiarity with zero-trust networking and service meshes such as SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, or Envoy.
•Track record of building developer tooling like CLIs, SDKs, or project generators.
•Experience with web scraping and crawling technical challenges.
•History of contributing to or maintaining open-source projects in distributed systems or data extraction.