Senior Platform Engineer

📍Eindhoven HQ (min. 1 day/week in office) | 🗓️ 40hrs per week

🚀 This is what you tell people at parties

We didn't become Europe's leading e-commerce shipping platform by playing it safe. Sendcloud powers 30,000+ online retailers, marketplaces, and fulfillment companies. Helping them ship smarter, grow faster, and actually get shit done for their customers. Boring logistics? Not here. We're building the platform that solves shipping, at scale, globally!

The Platform domain is the foundation everything else runs on — an AWS-native SaaS platform processing millions of parcels every day. As a Senior Platform Engineer, you don't just keep the lights on: you design how the infrastructure and tooling that thousands of European e-commerce businesses depend on actually works. You own real pieces of the platform end to end, help shape how the team builds things, and when something breaks at 2am, you're one of the people who can be trusted to fix it properly, not just patch it.

🧐 The Role

Role Description

Platform at Sendcloud is structured around two focused teams. Foundation Platform owns the core AWS infrastructure — EKS, VPC networking, IAM, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache, security controls, and Terraform modules — the engine room everything runs on. Developer Platform owns the developer experience layer — CI/CD pipelines, progressive delivery, observability tooling, and DORA metrics — the paved roads that help feature teams ship fast and safely.

• As the Senior Platform Engineer, you own real infrastructure and tooling within Foundation Platform or Developer Platform end to end, from a well-scoped problem through to production.
• You combine deep hands-on engineering with the judgement to make sound architectural calls inside your area of ownership, acting as a natural point of reference for the engineers around you.
• This is a step up from a Platform Engineer role: more ownership, more autonomy, and a genuine voice in how the team designs and operates the platform.
• It's a deliberate stepping stone toward Staff Engineer scope — you build the track record of independently-owned, well-executed initiatives that case rests on.

🎯 What you'll do

Technical Ownership & Execution

• Independently design, build, and operate platform services and infrastructure components within your area, from a well-scoped problem through to production.
• Make sound architectural decisions for medium-complexity, well-bounded problems, escalating and documenting trade-offs via ADRs when they reach beyond your immediate scope.
• Apply Infrastructure-as-Code, Kubernetes, and AWS best practices to keep services reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware.
• Lead at least one substantial roadmap item per planning cycle, planning and estimating it without requiring detailed external specification.
• Proactively find and fix what's broken — flaky pipelines, undocumented runbooks, unowned resources — without waiting to be asked.

Delivery & Collaboration

• Plan and deliver platform work within the team's six-week planning cycles, splitting larger initiatives into shippable increments.
• Coordinate with the other Platform team, Product Engineering, and stakeholders when your work has cross-team dependencies.
• Participate in the on-call rota, respond to incidents with urgency, and write clear, blameless post-mortems for incidents within your area.
• Contribute to Peak Season preparation and other organisation-wide operational programmes.
• Take part in the Engineering Hiring Interviewer Pool, helping assess platform engineering candidates.

Mentoring & Growth

• Mentor Platform Engineers and onboarding colleagues through pairing, code review, and technical guidance.
• Lead by example on code quality, testing, and documentation, and help raise the bar for the engineers around you.
• Share knowledge proactively — runbooks, design notes, and walkthroughs that reduce tribal knowledge and make the platform easier to operate for everyone.

Engineering Culture

• Give direct, constructive feedback in design discussions and code reviews, and be equally open to receiving it.
• Bring a "platform as a product" mindset — think about the internal teams who consume your services as real customers.
• Surface risks and technical debt early to your Engineering Manager and peers, rather than letting them become incidents.

✅ What you bring to the table

Personally

• You take ownership — you don't wait to be told what's broken, you find it and fix it, or flag it clearly.
• You communicate well: you can write an honest post-mortem, explain a trade-off in a design review, and disagree respectfully.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity, but you know when a problem needs to be escalated rather than solved alone.
• You see documentation as part of the job, not an afterthought.

Professionally

Must have

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including at least 2 years focused on platform, infrastructure, or SRE work.
• Solid AWS experience across core services: EKS, VPC/networking, IAM, RDS, S3, and at least one of CloudFront, WAF, or Lambda.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and Helm, including troubleshooting workloads and understanding RBAC and cluster operations.
• Practical experience with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform, including writing and maintaining reusable modules.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and understanding the principles of progressive delivery (canary, blue-green).
• Working knowledge of observability practices — metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLO/SLI thinking (Datadog or equivalent).
• A security-conscious mindset: IAM hygiene, secrets management, and awareness of compliance basics (SOC2, GDPR).
• Strong written and verbal English — you can explain a technical trade-off clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Strong advantage (nice to have)

• Experience operating a platform in a SaaS scale-up context — you understand the gap between a startup's infrastructure and a platform with real enterprise-grade commitments.
• Exposure to event-driven architecture (NATS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, or similar) in a multi-tenant environment.
• FinOps awareness — cost-per-service thinking, rightsizing, and the ability to spot wasteful infrastructure.
• Prior mentoring experience, whether formal or informal.

❤️ Our Values

• 💩 No bullshit: Big egos suck. Be open, honest and transparent. Share your mistakes openly and learn from them. Don't just talk about problems, solve them.
• 🎯 Grow & win: Be highly curious, adaptable & proactive. Embrace discomfort and change. Keep an open mindset and learn from others. You invest in our growth, so we invest in yours.
• 🎠 Have fun: Work hard, laugh harder. Not everything has to be serious. Be yourself, especially if you're the good kind of crazy. Sendcloud is an adventure, not a corporate maze, enjoy the ride.

🎉 Benefits

💸 Salary - From €80,000 gross annually, inclusive of 8% holiday pay (based on your specific skillset and professional background).

🧠 Brain Benefits - €2,000 learning budget · Courses, certifications & conferences · Growth in an international team

🌴 Time Benefits - 28 days of paid vacations per year · Extra day off on your birthday · Swap public holidays for meaningful ones

✈️ Sabbatical Benefits - 4 weeks fully paid every 3 years

🏡 Home Benefits - Flexible hybrid model (min. 1 day/week in office) · €500 home office budget

💪 Body Benefits - Company gym · Free lunch every Monday · Fresh fruit · Barista coffee

🚌 Travel Benefits - Monthly commuting allowance

🪑 Future Benefits - Pension scheme · Employee discount programs

🐾 Vibe Benefits - Dog-friendly office · After-hours drinks at the Sendcloud Bar