Software Engineer, Platform Engineering (L3)

This position is a critical engineering role within Twilio Platform Engineering, requiring a hands-on engineer capable of developing, deploying, and managing highly available, massive-scale distributed systems. Our systems regularly process more than 12 billion emails during peak events like Black Friday, and our throughput requirements continue to scale rapidly. As an L3 engineer, you will build and operate resilient backend services at scale and contribute to the design and reliability of our dual-cloud infrastructure spanning Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. You'll run Kubernetes beyond the boundaries of managed services, automate infrastructure with Terraform, and write production code to help keep distributed systems healthy under real production load while using modern AI-assisted tooling to move faster.

• Design, build, and operate services and automations to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale. Partner closely with product management and technical leadership to break down complex system requirements into manageable, iterative milestones.
• Drive rigorous code reviews and push for maintainable patterns in our codebase, ensuring high testing standards (unit, integration, and component testing) are executed across the team and platform.
• Manage and enhance cloud configurations across AWS and Azure environments utilizing Infrastructure as Code (Terraform). Ensure deep observability coverage by standardizing metrics, alerts, and distributed tracing across core data pipelines.
• Advocate for a clean architectural foundation. Proactively identify technical debt, system bottlenecks, and single points of failure (SPOF), balancing feature delivery with critical platform refactoring.
• Foster a collaborative environment by mentoring junior engineers, leading technical sprint planning, and sharing expertise across distributed engineering nodes.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating resilient backend services at scale using Kubernetes.
• Experience with CAPI, EKS and managing zero-downtime Kubernetes cluster upgrades, including node draining, API deprecations, and PodDisruptionBudgets.
• Practical experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code) to accelerate code generation, automate testing, and streamline debugging workflows or strong desire to learn.
• Hands-on experience implementing GitOps workflows with ArgoCD and automated pipeline orchestration with Harness (or an equivalent enterprise CI/CD platform).
• Strong, hands-on experience with Shell, Terraform, Yaml and Go (Golang).
• Solid experience deploying and managing production workloads in cloud environments - ideally with deep exposure to AWS core services (such as EKS, EC2, S3) or their Microsoft Azure equivalents (such as AKS, Virtual Machines, Blob Storage).
• Understanding of container networking (VPC/VNet, pod IPAM, CNI plugins).
• Proficiency with Terraform for provision-level automation and maintaining environment parity.
• Strong theoretical and practical understanding of distributed datastores, caching layers, and asynchronous event streaming (e.g., Kafka or similar queuing ecosystems).
• Strong foundational background in computer science fundamentals, data structures, and building self-healing cloud architectures.

• Prior experience managing high-throughput applications running inside containerized infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with advanced deployment strategies (canary, blue/green analysis).
• Experience with OPA/Gatekeeper or similar policy-as-code enforcement in Kubernetes.
• Experience implementing OpenTelemetry or distributed tracing systems across decoupled microservice platforms.
• Exposure to network topology, proxy layers, or mail transfer agent (MTA) protocol constraints.
• Aware and practical understanding of distributed datastores, caching layers, and asynchronous event streaming (e.g., Kafka or similar queuing ecosystems).
• Multi-Cloud migration/operating experience.

This role will be remote, but is not eligible to be hired in CA, CT, NJ, NY, PA, WA.

You may be required to travel occasionally to participate in project or team in-person meetings.

Working at Twilio offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.

The estimated pay ranges for this role are as follows: Based in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont or Washington D.C. : $138,700 - $173,400. This role may be eligible to participate in Twilio’s equity plan and corporate bonus plan. All roles are generally eligible for the following benefits: health care insurance, 401(k) retirement account, paid sick time, paid personal time off, paid parental leave.