Senior Platform Engineer

Hiire is supporting an early-stage fast-growing company operating at the intersection of distributed systems data infrastructure and operational workflows.

They are building highly scalable real-time platforms used in demanding and regulated environments where reliability observability and operational excellence are critical. The engineering culture is centered around ownership systems thinking and solving complex infrastructure challenges with real business impact.

This is an opportunity to join a highly technical team building the foundations that enable product and AI teams to move quickly safely and at scale.

Position Overview

Were looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own and evolve the infrastructure powering a distributed real-time platform. Youll sit at the intersection of platform engineering reliability and developer experience helping define the internal platform and operational standards that support the companys growth.

This role goes beyond traditional infrastructure work. Youll improve developer experience own observability and incident response practices and build the paved roads that allow engineering teams to ship reliably and efficiently.

The environment is particularly well suited to engineers who thrive in ambiguity enjoy ownership end-to-end and want to shape both a platform and the engineering culture behind it.

What youll do

Build and evolve the internal platform infrastructure that enables engineering teams to deploy test monitor and scale services independently

Improve the software delivery lifecycle by developing reliable CI/CD workflows for both application and AI-related workloads

Establish and maintain reliability standards across the platform through effective monitoring alerting and performance measurement practices

Take an active role in incident response troubleshooting production issues and driving post-incident improvements focused on long-term stability

Identify bottlenecks and operational risks across infrastructure and distributed systems proactively implementing solutions to improve resilience and scalability

Develop automation and internal tooling to streamline operations reduce manual intervention and improve platform efficiency

Oversee and optimize cloud-native infrastructure running on GCP including containerized and event-driven services

Support and optimize large-scale search and indexing systems powered by Elasticsearch

Enhance edge infrastructure security and traffic management through Cloudflare configuration and optimization

Contribute to infrastructure cost optimization initiatives while maintaining strong performance and reliability standards

Collaborate closely with Product Engineering and AI teams to support technical initiatives platform requirements and long-term architectural decisions

What you bring

5 years of experience working as a Platform Engineer Site Reliability Engineer or Senior/Staff Software Engineer in production environments

Strong hands-on experience with GCP or equivalent cloud platforms in scalable high-availability systems

Deep expertise with Kubernetes (GKE preferred) Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices

Proven experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions Cloud Build ArgoCD or similar

Strong understanding of modern observability practices including metrics logging tracing and alerting systems (OpenTelemetry or equivalent)

Experience operating and supporting distributed systems with a strong focus on reliability scalability and operational excellence

Comfortable participating in on-call rotations and leading incident management processes in production-critical environments

Strong communication and collaboration skills

Ability to operate autonomously and make sound technical decisions in fast-paced ambiguous startup environments

A systems-thinking mindset

Nice to Have

Experience operating scaling and tuning Elasticsearch clusters in production environments

Experience deploying and supporting LLMs or other ML models in production

Familiarity with AI agent architectures inference pipelines or GPU-based workloads

Experience working in regulated security-sensitive or high-compliance environments

Why join us

The opportunity to tackle meaningful and technically challenging problems with real-world impact

A highly collaborative environment where ownership autonomy and technical excellence are genuinely valued

Flat hierarchy with direct access to the founders and strong influence on technical decisions

Join the team onsite in Porto working closely with engineering and leadership this is hybrid role (2 days/week onsite)

Private health insurance plus sick and compassionate leave as needed