# Senior Staff Cloud Platform Engineer
**Company:** [1Password](https://scaleengineer.com/companies/1password)
Senior Staff Cloud Platform Engineer at 1Password setting multi-year technical strategy for Infrastructure Services across compute, network, edge, and stateful systems. This hands-on role requires deep expertise in Kubernetes at production scale, cloud cost optimization, and reliability engineering while mentoring staff-level engineers and influencing cross-functional technical decisions. The ideal candidate combines strategic infrastructure architecture with hands-on proficiency in Go and Infrastructure as Code, partnering with product, security, and finance leadership to balance reliability, security, cost, and delivery velocity.
**Role:** Staff Engineer
**Seniority:** Staff
**Locations:** Remote (United States | Canada)
**Remote:** yes
**Salary:** 230000–334000 USD
[Apply](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/1password/25e52edb-3d1a-43ab-a6d1-ad2a36f0c8ee)
Canonical: https://scaleengineer.com/jobs/1password/senior-staff-cloud-platform-engineer
---
## Responsibilities

- Set Multi-Year Technical Strategy: Define the strategic direction for Infrastructure Services spanning compute, network and edge, and stateful services. Work with directors and senior engineering leadership to shape roadmap priorities, investment decisions, and build versus buy evaluations that align with company objectives and technical vision.
- Define Architecture and Standards: Establish patterns, standards, and guardrails across all three infrastructure domains that internal teams and tenants depend on for years. Create cohesive architectural frameworks that prevent siloed development and ensure consistent reliability, security, and operational excellence.
- Lead Cross-Organizational Reviews: Represent Infrastructure Services as the senior technical voice in cross-organization reviews with product engineering, security, and finance. Present infrastructure perspectives on product roadmaps, security requirements, and financial impact to ensure balanced decision-making across the organization.
- Manage Major Incident Escalations: Serve as primary escalation point for critical incidents affecting platform stability. Drive organization-wide improvements to incident management processes, reliability targets, error budgets, and disaster recovery capabilities to minimize impact and prevent recurrence.
- Drive Cost and Efficiency Strategy: Lead cloud cost optimization, capacity planning, and operational efficiency initiatives with measurable financial goals. Implement cost reduction strategies through capacity automation, right-sizing, architecture optimization, and commitment strategies while collaborating with finance on forecasting and tradeoffs.
- Advance Automation and AI Operations: Drive adoption of automation and AI-assisted operations tools to reduce operational toil across the infrastructure organization. Identify opportunities for intelligent remediation, diagnostics, and monitoring that improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and team productivity.
- Mentor Infrastructure Leaders: Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, establishing high standards for design review and engineering practice. Contribute to hiring, evaluation, and development of next-generation infrastructure leaders while raising the technical bar across the organization.

## Requirements

### education

- {"name":"Computer Science or Related Field (Preferred)","description":"Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline preferred. Equivalent professional experience and demonstrated expertise in infrastructure engineering and systems design is equally valued."}

### technical

- {"name":"Kubernetes Production Operations at Scale","description":"Deep operational expertise running Kubernetes in multi-cluster, multi-tenant, customer-traffic-bearing production environments. Proficiency with managed Kubernetes platforms (EKS, GKE, or equivalent), including autoscaling policies, admission control, GitOps workflows, workload identity implementations, and fleet-wide cluster upgrade orchestration."}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code","description":"Expert-level proficiency in Terraform or equivalent IaC tooling for declarative infrastructure provisioning, state management, and policy enforcement. Demonstrated ability to automate complex, high-toil operational workflows and fleet-scale infrastructure changes with safety and repeatability."}
- {"name":"Go Programming Language","description":"Proficient in Go or similar compiled, strongly-typed language for building infrastructure tooling, automation, and operational utilities. Ability to design and implement performant, maintainable code that solves complex infrastructure problems at scale."}
- {"name":"Cloud Networking and Edge Architecture","description":"Working fluency in modern cloud networking architectures including service-to-service communication, ingress/egress patterns, multi-region connectivity, and edge computing. Understanding of how networking decisions cascade through application and infrastructure layers."}
- {"name":"Stateful Data Systems Operations","description":"Operational experience with scalable database technologies including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DynamoDB. Understanding of data replication, failover, backup strategies, capacity planning, and performance optimization for mission-critical stateful workloads."}
- {"name":"Reliability Engineering and Observability","description":"Expertise defining Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets. Proficiency implementing comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing systems that enable rapid incident detection and root cause analysis."}
- {"name":"Cloud Cost Optimization","description":"Demonstrated track record of measurable cloud cost reduction through engineering approaches including capacity automation, instance right-sizing, architectural optimization, and commitment strategy negotiation. Experience forecasting and managing cloud spend with finance teams."}
- {"name":"Security and Identity Architecture","description":"Strong understanding of workload identity, least-privilege IAM and RBAC design, credential rotation mechanisms, and multi-tenant isolation patterns. Experience partnering with security teams on risk decisions, threat modeling, and compliance requirement implementation."}

### experience

- {"name":"Multi-Team Infrastructure Leadership","description":"Owned infrastructure strategy or architecture spanning multiple teams or an entire engineering organization. Demonstrated ability to set technical direction that drives adoption, ships features, and produces measurable multi-year outcomes affecting platform stability and velocity."}
- {"name":"Organization-Scale Reliability Transformation","description":"Led reliability improvements across multiple teams beyond individual team scope. Established SLI/SLO practices, improved incident response and post-incident learning, and advanced disaster recovery capabilities through organizational change and best practice adoption."}
- {"name":"Hands-On Production Debugging and Escalation","description":"Demonstrated ability to step into critical production incidents, perform deep technical investigation, and drive resolution. Comfortable with on-call responsibilities and escalation scenarios requiring rapid decision-making under pressure."}
- {"name":"Cross-Functional Technical Influence","description":"Proven track record influencing technical decisions across product, security, and finance organizations without direct authority. Experience writing strategy and design documents for senior leadership, resolving technical disagreements, and building alignment on difficult tradeoffs."}
- {"name":"Engineering Mentorship and Technical Hiring","description":"Mentored Senior and Staff-level engineers through career progression. Contributed to raising bar on design review quality, establishing technical evaluation criteria, and shaping organizational hiring practices and talent development processes."}

## Skills

### required

- {"name":"Kubernetes Architecture and Operations","description":"Design, operate, and optimize Kubernetes clusters at production scale including autoscaling, resource management, multi-tenancy, and workload orchestration"}
- {"name":"Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)","description":"Automate infrastructure provisioning and management using Terraform with deep understanding of state management, modularity, and policy-as-code patterns"}
- {"name":"Go Programming","description":"Write performant, maintainable infrastructure tooling and automation in Go with modern concurrency, testing, and deployment patterns"}
- {"name":"Cloud Networking","description":"Design and operate cloud networking including VPCs, security groups, load balancing, service mesh patterns, and multi-region connectivity"}
- {"name":"SRE and Reliability Engineering","description":"Define and implement SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, incident management processes, and observability systems for high-reliability platforms"}
- {"name":"Database Operations","description":"Operate production relational and non-relational databases including backup, recovery, scaling, and performance optimization"}
- {"name":"Technical Strategy and Architecture","description":"Develop multi-year technical strategies, create architecture decision records, and communicate technical direction to engineering and business leadership"}
- {"name":"Cloud Cost Management","description":"Optimize cloud infrastructure costs through engineering approaches including capacity planning, right-sizing, and commitment strategy"}

### preferred

- {"name":"Service Mesh Technology","description":"Hands-on experience with service mesh platforms such as Linkerd or Amazon VPC Lattice for sophisticated service-to-service networking and observability"}
- {"name":"AI-Assisted Operations","description":"Experience building or deeply integrating AI-assisted operations tools including automated remediation, intelligent diagnosis, and anomaly detection systems"}
- {"name":"Developer Platform Design","description":"Designed and implemented abstractions for internal teams such as paved-road service frameworks, production readiness checklists, and platform tooling that demonstrably improved developer productivity"}
- {"name":"Multi-Region SaaS Operations","description":"Operated highly available, multi-region services in large-scale SaaS environments with capacity planning and performance optimization at tens of thousands of customer scale"}
- {"name":"Security-Critical Product Experience","description":"Background operating infrastructure for security, identity, or other high-trust product environments requiring compliance, audit readiness, and zero-trust principles"}
- {"name":"Advanced Database Technology","description":"Operational expertise with scalable database technologies including distributed PostgreSQL, MySQL clusters, or managed DynamoDB at large scale"}

## Tech stack

### tools

- {"name":"Terraform","description":"Infrastructure as Code tool for declarative AWS, cloud, and Kubernetes resource provisioning and state management"}
- {"name":"AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, etc.)","description":"Primary cloud platform with managed Kubernetes (EKS), compute, networking, and database services"}
- {"name":"Prometheus","description":"Metrics collection and time-series database for infrastructure and application monitoring and alerting"}
- {"name":"Grafana","description":"Visualization and dashboarding platform for metrics, logs, and traces enabling observability at scale"}
- {"name":"Linkerd","description":"Service mesh for Kubernetes providing observability, security, and traffic management capabilities"}
- {"name":"ArgoCD","description":"GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes enabling declarative, auditable infrastructure deployments"}
- {"name":"Docker","description":"Container runtime and image format for packaging applications and infrastructure tooling"}
- {"name":"Vault","description":"Secrets management system for credential rotation, workload identity, and privilege separation"}

### others

- {"name":"Kubernetes Networking and CNI","description":"Deep understanding of Kubernetes networking plugins, service discovery, ingress controllers, and network policies"}
- {"name":"Incident Management and Postmortems","description":"Blameless postmortem culture, incident command systems, and continuous improvement from production events"}
- {"name":"SLI/SLO/Error Budget Frameworks","description":"Defining measurable reliability targets and aligning infrastructure investments with business objectives"}
- {"name":"Multi-Tenant Architecture Patterns","description":"Designing and operating infrastructure providing strong isolation and independent scaling for multiple internal teams or customers"}
- {"name":"Cloud Cost Monitoring and FinOps","description":"Tools and practices for tracking cloud spend, forecasting, chargebacks, and optimization"}

### databases

- {"name":"PostgreSQL","description":"Primary relational database for stateful services requiring transactions, complex queries, and strong consistency guarantees"}
- {"name":"MySQL","description":"Relational database system for scalable data tier with replication and high-availability configurations"}
- {"name":"DynamoDB","description":"Managed NoSQL database for serverless and highly scalable stateful services in AWS environments"}
- {"name":"Etcd","description":"Distributed configuration and state management for Kubernetes cluster coordination and application metadata"}

### languages

- {"name":"Go","description":"Primary language for infrastructure tooling, automation, and operational utilities with emphasis on reliability and performance"}
- {"name":"Python","description":"Supporting language for operational scripts, testing, and infrastructure automation tooling"}
- {"name":"Bash/Shell","description":"Essential for cluster administration, operational scripting, and cross-platform automation"}

### frameworks

- {"name":"Kubernetes","description":"Primary container orchestration platform for workload management, multi-tenancy, and infrastructure abstraction"}
- {"name":"Helm","description":"Package manager for Kubernetes deployments enabling templating, versioning, and reproducible infrastructure patterns"}
- {"name":"GitOps Workflows","description":"Infrastructure deployment patterns using Git as source of truth with tools like ArgoCD for declarative infrastructure synchronization"}

## Benefits

### benefits

- {"name":"Comprehensive Health Coverage","description":"Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance plans with coverage for employees and dependents"}
- {"name":"Retirement Planning","description":"401(k) retirement savings program with company matching contributions (USA) or RRSP program (Canada)"}
- {"name":"Equity Participation","description":"RSU (Restricted Stock Unit) grants for most employees, aligning compensation with company growth and success"}
- {"name":"Generous PTO Policy","description":"Flexible and generous paid time off to support work-life balance and personal wellbeing"}
- {"name":"Parental Leave Support","description":"Maternity and parental leave top-up programs providing income support during family transitions"}
- {"name":"Professional Development","description":"Access to learning resources, conferences, and professional development opportunities to advance technical skills"}
- {"name":"Free 1Password Account","description":"Complimentary access to 1Password premium security features for personal and family use"}
- {"name":"Peer Recognition Program","description":"Bonusly peer-to-peer recognition platform enabling team members to acknowledge contributions and celebrate wins"}
- {"name":"Paid Volunteer Days","description":"Annual paid time for volunteering and community engagement activities aligned with personal values"}

## Compensation

- **max:** 334000
- **min:** 230000
- **currency:** USD
- **stockOptions:** true

## Interview process

### steps

## Full description
_**1Password is growing.** We’ve surpassed $400M in ARR and we’re continuing to accelerate, earning a spot on the Forbes Cloud 100 for four years in a row and teaming up with iconic partners like Oracle Red Bull Racing._

**About 1Password**

_At 1Password, we’re building the foundation for a safe, productive digital future. Our mission is to unleash employee productivity without compromising security by ensuring every identity is authentic, every application sign-in is secure, and every device is trusted. We innovated the market-leading enterprise password manager and pioneered Unified Access Management, a new cybersecurity category built for the way people and AI agents work today. As one of the most loved brands in cybersecurity, we take a human-centric approach in everything from product strategy to user experience. Over 180,000 businesses, from Fortune 100 leaders to the world’s most innovative AI companies, trust 1Password to help their teams securely adopt the SaaS and AI tools they need to do their best work._

_If you're excited about the opportunity to contribute to the digital safety of millions, to work alongside a team of curious, driven individuals, and to solve hard problems in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, then we want to hear from you. Come join us and help shape a safer, simpler digital future._

Our Infrastructure Services organization is responsible for the underlying infrastructure that powers the 1Password application. It includes Compute Services, Network and Edge Services, and Stateful Services.

As a Senior Staff Cloud Platform Engineer, you set the multi-year technical strategy for Infrastructure Services. You decide where the organization invests, define the architecture and standards that every infrastructure team and internal tenant builds on, and make sure our compute, network and edge, and stateful platforms evolve as one coherent system rather than three separate ones. You partner with engineering and product leadership, security, and finance to balance reliability, security, cost, and delivery speed, and you are the senior technical voice for infrastructure across the company.

This is a hands-on role. You write design docs, prototype, review the hardest designs, and step into the most serious incidents. But your main impact comes from making many teams more effective and from the decisions that hold up for years.

**How we’re using AI today**

Our Engineering, Product, and Design teams are thoughtfully integrating AI across the full software and product development lifecycle to move faster without sacrificing quality or security. In practice, that looks like engineers using AI-assisted coding tools to accelerate reviews and catch bugs earlier, product managers synthesizing user research at scale, and designers rapidly prototyping and iterating with AI-generated mockups. We approach AI the same way we approach security: with clear principles, human accountability at every consequential decision point, and rigorous evaluation before anything ships to customers.

This is a remote opportunity within Canada and the US.

**What we're looking for:**

* **You have set technical direction across multiple teams.** You have owned an infrastructure strategy or architecture spanning several teams or an entire organization, and you can point to the multi-year outcomes: what others adopted, what shipped, and what measurably improved.
* **You have operated Kubernetes at production scale.** This includes multi-cluster, multi-tenant, customer-traffic-bearing environments (EKS or similar managed platforms preferred). You know it deeply, from autoscaling and admission control to GitOps, workload identity, and fleet-wide cluster upgrades.
* **You combine depth with breadth.** Beyond Kubernetes, you have working fluency in networking and edge and in stateful data systems, and you understand how a decision in one layer affects the rest.
* **You have made reliability a standard, not a project.** You defined SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and you got multiple teams to adopt them. You have improved incident response, post-incident learning, and disaster recovery across an organization, not just on your own team.
* **You have cut cloud costs through engineering.** You can show measurable, real-dollar impact from work such as capacity automation, right-sizing, architecture changes, or commitment strategy, and you have worked with finance on forecasting and tradeoffs.
* **You build security in by design.** You have driven practices such as workload identity, least-privilege IAM and RBAC, credential rotation, and strong isolation in multi-tenant environments, and you have partnered with security teams on risk decisions and compliance requirements.
* **You still build.** You are proficient in Go (or a similar language) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and you have a track record of automating complex, high-toil operational workflows at fleet scale.
* **You influence without relying on authority.** You write clear strategy and design documents, present to senior leaders, resolve technical disagreements between teams, and build alignment on difficult tradeoffs.
* **You grow other engineers.** You have mentored Senior and Staff engineers, raised the bar on design review, and helped shape how your organization hires and evaluates technical talent.

**Bonus points for:**

* Hands-on experience with service mesh and service-to-service networking, such as Linkerd or Amazon VPC Lattice.
* Experience operating scalable database technology, such as MySQL, Postgres, or DynamoDB.
* Designing developer platform abstractions for internal teams, such as paved-road service toolkits and production readiness frameworks, that measurably improved usability and productivity.
* Helping build AI-assisted operations tools, such as auto-remediation or AI-assisted diagnosis, rather than only using them.
* Operating highly available, multi-region services in a large SaaS environment, including capacity planning and performance optimization at scale.
* Experience in a security, identity, or other high-trust product environment.

**What you can expect:**

* Set the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for Infrastructure Services, working with directors and senior engineering leadership to shape roadmap and investment decisions, including build versus buy.
* Define the patterns, standards, and guardrails across compute, network and edge, and stateful services that internal teams depend on for years.
* Represent Infrastructure Services in cross-organization reviews with product engineering, security, and finance, and serve as the senior technical voice for the platform.
* Serve as an escalation point for major incidents, and drive organization-wide improvements to incident management, reliability targets, and disaster recovery.
* Lead cost, capacity, and efficiency strategy for our cloud footprint, with measurable goals.
* Drive adoption of automation and AI-assisted operations to reduce toil across the organization.
* Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, raise the bar on design review and engineering practice, and help us hire and develop the next generation of infrastructure leaders.

USA-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $230,000 USD and $334,000 USD, plus immediate participation in 1Password's benefits program (health, dental, 401k and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.

Canada-based roles only: The annual base salary for this role is between $202,000 CAD and $293,000 CAD, plus immediate participation in 1Password’s generous benefits program (health, dental, RRSP and many others), utilization of our generous paid time off, an equity grant and, where applicable, participation in our incentive programs.

  
At 1Password, we approach each individual's compensation with a promise of fair market value and internal equity commensurate with experience and specific skill set.  
  
_This posting is for an existing vacancy._  

  
**Our culture**   
At 1Password, we prioritize collaboration, clear and transparent communication, receptiveness to feedback, and alignment with our core values: keep it simple, lead with honesty, and put people first.   
  
You’ll be part of a team that challenges the status quo, and is excited to experiment and iterate in search of the best solution. That said, [_1Password is not for everyone_](https://blog.1password.com/inside-the-culture-powering-1passwords-next-chapter/). Our work is demanding, we strive for excellence, and the pace is fast. We need people who are keen to take on challenging problems, who seek feedback to grow, and who are driven to make an impact. If you're looking for a place where you can settle into a comfortable routine, this might not be the right fit for you. We’re looking for individuals who are proven experts in their fields, as well as those who are highly adaptable, can thrive in ambiguity and through change, are curious, and above all deliver results.   
  
**How we work with AI**  
We are committed to leveraging cutting-edge technology—including AI—to achieve our mission. We also understand that thinking critically about AI in its current forms will help us create better solutions for our customers and ourselves with its future forms, which will help us continue to close the gap between security and privacy and achieve our mission. We want team members at all levels to take the approach of actively learning AI best practices, identifying opportunities to apply AI in meaningful ways, and driving innovative solutions in their daily work. Embracing the future of AI isn't just encouraged—it's an essential part of how we will be successful at 1Password.

This approach extends to our hiring process—candidates are welcome to use AI tools responsibly and thoughtfully during the application process. To us, this means we do ask that you join live interviews without using AI tools so we can get to know how you communicate, solve problems, and collaborate with others.  
  
**Our approach to remote work**   
We believe in the power of remote work, but recognize that in-person connection is important to help us achieve our mission. While we are a remote-first company, travel for in-person engagement is a part of almost all roles, and we require our employees to be ready and willing to take part. Frequency will depend on role and responsibilities, and may include, but is not limited to: annual department-wide offsites, team meetings, and customer/industry events.  
  
**What we offer**  
We believe in working hard, and rewarding that hard work through our benefits. While not an exhaustive list, here is a glance at what we currently offer:   
  
_Health and wellbeing_  
👶 Maternity and parental leave top-up programs  
🩺 Competitive health benefits  
🏝 Generous PTO policy   
  
 _Growth and future_   
📈 RSU program for most employees  
💸 Retirement matching program  
🔑 Free 1Password account  
  
_Community_   
🤝 Paid volunteer days   
🏆 Peer-to-peer recognition through Bonusly  
🌎 Remote-first work environment  
_\*Some roles in our GTM team are currently being hired for in-person hybrid work in Toronto and Austin. These roles will specify on the posting._

**You belong here.**

_1Password is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that is built on trust, support and respect. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. Be yourself, find your people and share the things you love._

_Accommodation is available upon request at any point during our recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please speak to your talent acquisition partner or email us at nextbit@agilebits.com and we’ll work to meet your needs._

_Remote work is a part of our DNA. Given that our company was founded remotely in 2005, we can safely say we're experts at building remote culture. That said, remote work at 1Password does mean working from your home country. If you've got questions or concerns about this, your talent partner would be happy to address them with you._

_Successful applicants will be required to complete a background check that may consist of prior employment verification, reference checks, education confirmation, criminal background, publicly available social media, credit history, or other information, as permitted by local law._

_1Password uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, including natural language processing and predictive analytics, to assist in the initial screening of employment applications and improve our recruitment process. See_ [_here_](https://www.ashbyhq.com/downloadables/ashby-bias-audit-08-2024.pdf) _for the latest third party bias audit information. If you prefer not to have your application assessed using AI/ML features, you may opt out by completing_ [_this form_](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/1password/automation-notice)_. For additional information see our_ [_Candidate Privacy Notice_](https://1password.com/files/candidate-privacy-notice.pdf)_._