Staff Software Engineer - Services Platform

About this role

At its height, the Venetian Arsenal could produce ships at a speed that were mostly unmatched in its era. Its advantage was not simply that its craftspeople worked faster. Venice standardized the pieces around them. Parts, processes, and responsibilities became reusable enough that shipbuilding became stamp and repeat, not creating from scratch every time. Mercury's services ecosystem is reaching a similar transition.

As more of Mercury moves beyond our core Haskell monolith, product teams are increasingly building and operating independent services. That gives teams more flexibility, but it also creates a new class of infrastructure problems. How should services authenticate to each other? How should they be discovered? What does a safe deployment look like? How does an engineer understand whether their service is healthy? And how do we answer those questions once, rather than asking every product team to build its own version? We’re looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to become a technical owner for Mercury’s services platform.

You’ll help define the paved road for building and running services at Mercury. This is a deeply technical role, but the hardest problems won’t be solved by writing code. You’ll need excellent judgment about what is worth standardizing, what should stay flexible, how quickly we can move, and how to bring a large engineering organization along with you. We see this role as the trailblazer for several more engineers to follow so the foundations and relationships you build across the org will pay off for those who come after! In this role, you’ll: Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.

Own the strategy for service ecosystem at Mercury including identity, authentication, discovery and communication Work with product stakeholders and Release Engineering to create a paved deployment path with strong defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration, secrets, and operational safety. Help evolve Mercury’s service runtime architecture, including our use of Kubernetes, while keeping existing services healthy through the transition.