Staff Engineer – Core & MLOps (Remote, Saudi Arabia)

About the role

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.

Key responsibilities

• 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 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.

Required profile

• 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.
• Strong reliability engineering background, including SLO/SLI definition, blast‑radius analysis, fault tolerance, and rigorous service contracts.
• Exceptional technical writing and communication skills for a globally distributed, remote‑first environment.
• Curious, continuous‑learning mindset with interest in evaluating new technologies, architectures, and engineering approaches.

Required skills

• Java (advanced, Vert.x, Netty)
• Python
• gRPC
• Protocol Buffers
• Kubernetes
• Terraform
• Kafka (Confluent)
• HAProxy/Nginx
• Helm
• Valkey
• Temporal (optional)
• DBOS (optional)
• MLOps (model serving, performance monitoring)
• Zero‑trust networking and service meshes (SPIRE, mTLS, Cilium, Istio, Envoy)

What we offer

• Fully remote, remote‑first working environment with flexible hours.
• Freedom to work from the location where you are most productive.
• Opportunity to work on core infrastructure supporting large‑scale web data pipelines and distributed systems.
• Exposure to cutting‑edge open‑source technologies, tools, and evolving AI and web data infrastructure.
• Opportunities to attend conferences and connect with colleagues globally.
• Collaboration with a diverse, multicultural, globally distributed engineering community.
• High level of autonomy and organizational trust.
• Influence platform architecture, engineering standards, and technical strategy across multiple teams.