Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer | Netherlands Most customers will never think about the platform underneath the product they use. That’s probably a good thing. Behind it sits a ridiculous amount of complexity. Multiple markets. External integrations. High transaction volumes. Huge spikes in demand. And thousands of businesses expecting everything to work without needing to understand what’s happening underneath. I’m working confidentially with an established European B2B SaaS company, helping them hire a Staff Platform Engineer. And this is a genuine Staff-level seat. Not a Senior Engineer vacancy with a shinier title. And definitely not somebody who has simply spent a long time writing Terraform. The challenge is bigger than keeping infrastructure running. They want to give engineering teams the building blocks, guardrails and tooling to build, release and run their own software properly. Underneath that sits Kubernetes, networking, firewalls, databases, identity, observability and the foundational infrastructure supporting the wider product. Sitting between that foundation and the feature teams is the developer platform. CI/CD. GitOps. Release patterns. Observability blueprints. Automation. Standardised ways of consuming infrastructure without every engineering team inventing its own version of the same thing. And that’s where you come in. You’ll still be hands-on, but your impact can’t depend solely on your own pair of hands. You’ll help shape the architecture, lead technical delivery across teams and turn good platform components into something developers can actually use. This isn’t about building something technically impressive, dropping it in front of engineering and telling everyone they’re welcome. You’ll need to understand how developers work, what slows them down and where a standardised approach genuinely makes them more effective. Likewise, you’re not there to become an internal ticket desk or take ownership away from them. The belief here is very much: you build it, you run it. Feature teams own their services in production. Platform gives them the paved roads, guardrails and support to do it properly. Technically, it looks something like: AWS.Kubernetes.Terraform.GitLab pipelines.Argo CD.Networking and security fundamentals.Observability and production reliability.AWS experience would help you get moving quickly, particularly at Staff level, but this isn’t a keyword exercise. They care more about whether you understand the principles underneath the tooling. Can you explain what’s actually happening with the network, rather than just getting Terraform to deploy it? Can you design something other teams will willingly adopt? Can you balance the technically perfect answer against what the product and business actually need? And, perhaps most importantly, do you ask enough questions before deciding you already know the answer? The team has strong engineers and no shortage of technical opinions. They need somebody with enough depth to hold their own, enough maturity to change their mind and enough influence to turn a long discussion into a decision. What you get; 90k-€120k TC28 days holiday standard + an extra day for your birthday + a paid sabbatical for 1 month every couple of years2k budget for learningNetherlands, minimum one office day per week. There's more. But I'll keep some in my back pocket. If your idea of platform engineering is enabling developers rather than doing everything for them, this should be worth a conversation. You know what to do.