Senior Platform Engineer

About this role

Responsibilities

• Alva runs as event-driven microservices on GCP. We ship product features on top of LLMs and agents, and our engineers use Claude Code daily. The scope is broad — nobody we hire will have done all of it. We're hiring for judgment and how fast you pick up the rest.
• Some shipped, some in flight, some still on the drawing board — a sample of what the team owns:
• Migrating our backend services from Kubernetes to Cloud Run, along with the Pub/Sub subscriptions.
• Introducing pgbouncer in front of Postgres to scale past our replica cap.
• Building a Backstage-style developer portal with an MCP layer — one source of truth for services, conventions, and architecture, for engineers and coding agents alike.
• Scaffolding agentic features so product squads ship them without reinventing prompts, evals, and guardrails each time.
• A protobuf schema registry and data contracts pipeline to fix the drift between services and BigQuery.
• Enabling the data team — shared patterns and pipelines (dlt, BigQuery) that let analytics work scale alongside engineering.
• How we work
• We use Claude Cod

Requirements

• You've operated production systems for several years and have opinions about how they should be built.
• You think in failure modes. You ask what happens at 3 am before you ask what happens on the happy path.
• You're effective with AI tools. You steer them, push back, and verify their output instead of trusting it.
• You explain decisions clearly and change your mind when someone has a better argument.
• If you've done most of the work below in some form, at any cloud, at any scale, we want to talk. A checklist match isn't required.