About the role

What will you do at Compa?

About Compa

Compa is a venture-backed AI startup revolutionizing the future of compensation.

In a dynamic job market with hiring challenges, accountability, and the rise of AI, companies need the best data to stay ahead of industry changes, competition, and costs. Compa has developed the premier real-time compensation data platform, delivering top-tier compensation intelligence to leading enterprise teams.

Compa is a compensation intelligence company built to augment enterprise compensation teams in the era of AI.

Our customers include the world’s biggest companies: NVIDIA, Stripe, DoorDash, Open AI, TMobile, Moderna, Workday, Ulta, Target, and more.

Locations:

Compa headquarters are located in Irvine, California, with growing sites in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California. We’re a collaborative, curious, and driven team that values transparency, ownership, and continuous learning and prioritizing in person work where possible.

The role

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll own and lead platform engineering across our cloud, data, and AI/ML systems. Multi-cloud is central to what we're building, not a future initiative!

You'll work closely with your teammates and engineering leadership to set direction, and build the foundation that lets every team at Compa move fast, strategically. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role where your decisions shape how the enterprise builds and ships.

What you'll do

Design, build, and maintain core infrastructure across cloud, data, and AI/ML systems

Own and evolve Compa's Kubernetes-based platforms across AWS, GCP, and Azure

Drive multi-cloud initiatives including cloud abstraction patterns, cross-cloud identity, networking, data movement, traffic routing, and customer-managed encryption keys

Define platform standards for Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload isolation, tenancy, networking, security, scaling, upgrades, and operational ownership

Scale and automate infrastructure services and internal tooling

Raise the bar on reliability and observability through SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, and incident response

Design and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, infrastructure automation and paved paths for engineering teams

Lead platform efforts that reduce developer toil and improve velocity

Partner with leadership on technical direction and roadmap

Act as a multiplier, setting standards that help engineers around you level-up

What we're looking for

8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong emphasis on infrastructure and platform development

Deep, hands-on experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or AKS) - cluster architecture, networking, scaling, upgrades and production operations

Strong Python skills applied to infrastructure tooling and backend systems

Hands-on experience designing and operating production systems across at least two of AWS, GCP, and Azure; this is a must-have

Experience managing infrastructure across cloud boundaries: identity, networking, data, traffic routing, and failover

Observability tooling experience such as Prometheus, Grafana,, OpenTelemetry, Loki or ELK, Jeager, or Tempo

Comfortable with high ownership and ambiguity - you've built things without a playbook before

Nice to have

DevOps and SRE practices: infrastructure as code, CI/CD, incident response

Security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, encryption, least privilege

Exposure to MLOps

Early-stage startup experience

Which skills does this role require?

KubernetesAWSGCPAzurePythonMulti-cloud ArchitectureObservabilityPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryNetworkingEKSGKEAKSMulti-cloudLokiELKJaegerTempoSLISLOPlatform EngineeringCloud AbstractionTraffic RoutingAI StartupMachine LearningProduct Strategy

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