Software Development Engineer Staff, Equinix
$142-212k
Office located in Redwood City, CA
Digital infrastructure company
Be an early applicant
Digital infrastructure company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$142-212k
Office located in Redwood City, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide finance, manufacturing, transport, government, and healthcare organizations a cloud-first world.
Role
Who you are
- Production experience building developer platform tooling — repo generators, CI/CD scaffolding frameworks, devcontainer or ephemeral environment automation — not just consuming them
- Strong in Go or Python; deep fluency with GitHub Actions for CI/CD pipeline generation and automation
- Hands-on Terraform experience for infrastructure generation and self-service provisioning patterns
- Experience with OPA or equivalent policy-as-code engines integrated into build and deploy workflows
- Strong understanding of container runtimes, base image management, and environment parity patterns (devcontainers, Docker Compose, Kubernetes)
- Experience designing and maintaining template lifecycle systems: versioning, migration paths, backward compatibility, rollback safety
- Familiarity with schema validation tooling and CLI-first developer experience design
- Comfortable working across the stack from schema design through to CI integration and portal plugin surfaces
- 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years in a platform engineering or developer experience role at a mid-to-large engineering organization
- Has designed and operated opinionated golden-path systems at scale — the kind that hundreds of engineers depend on daily. Background from companies with strong platform cultures (e.g., Spotify, Netflix, Stripe, Uber, Airbnb) is strongly preferred
- Track record of reducing developer toil through automation, not just documentation or guidelines
- Strong written communication skills — this role produces tooling that must be self-explanatory, and documentation is part of the deliverable
- Able to work cross-functionally with security, CI/CD, and application engineering teams to align on standards without creating bottlenecks
- Experience with Backstage or similar developer portal frameworks is a plus
- Familiarity with enterprise compliance requirements (audit trails, change evidence, vulnerability scanning integration) is a plus
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own the inner loop of our developer platform — the scaffolding, environment bootstrap, and shared library systems that determine how fast and confidently engineers go from idea to first commit
- This role is foundational: the composable scaffolding engine, declarative service schemas, and template lifecycle systems you build will directly determine whether developers experience a golden path or a maze of tribal knowledge and configuration drift
- You will design and ship opinionated, production-grade tooling that generates repositories, CI pipelines, baseline tests, and infrastructure hooks from a single schema declaration — and maintain those templates safely over time as the platform evolves
- This is not a role for someone who has used golden-path systems; it's for someone who has built and operated them at scale
- Composable Scaffolding Engine
- Design and build the engine that generates repositories, CI/CD pipelines, baseline tests, configuration, and platform integrations from declarative service schemas with opinionated defaults and extensibility hooks
- Own the full scaffolding surface: repo generator, CI/CD pipeline generator, config manager, secrets/env var wiring, and integration layer into GitHub and cloud providers
- Ensure generated scaffolds are immediately functional — wired to CI, observability, and infra hooks from day one, with no blank-page setup required
- Declarative Service & Workload Schemas
- Define and maintain the schema specification that captures application type, runtime, dependencies, testing defaults, and infrastructure intent in a standardized, versioned format
- Build validation tooling (CLI and CI-integrated) to enforce schema correctness and surface errors early
- Reduce time-to-first-commit from the current 18–40 day range to under one week
- Template Lifecycle Management
- Build the versioning, validation, and upgrade system that evolves scaffolds over time while preserving backward compatibility for downstream projects
- Implement three-way merge logic (template old → template new → customized service) with rollback safety and customization detection so teams can adopt template updates without breaking builds
- Local Dev & Environment Bootstrap
- Build and maintain standardized local and ephemeral development environment descriptors (devcontainers, Docker Compose, golden images) with parity validation against CI and target runtimes
- Implement environment automation: just-in-time provisioning triggered by pull request, configuration injection for secrets and service discovery, and tear-down automation
- Implement environment health and drift detection to catch "works on my machine" failures before they reach CI
- Reusable Shared Libraries
- Build and maintain versioned shared libraries for cross-cutting concerns — logging, encryption, auto-configuration, trace propagation, and Docker base images — as consumable, consistent building blocks for all application teams
- Ensure libraries are secure from inception and reduce fragmentation in security posture and reliability across the service ecosystem
Our take
Equinix is a veteran player in the digital infrastructure market, connecting industry-leading organizations in finance, manufacturing, retail, transportation, government, healthcare, and education.
The company provides a range of services within the categories of digital, support, data center, and interconnection, with capabilities including, for example, simplifying hybrid cloud deployments or securing on-site deployments. It has an extensive range of partners, granting its clients access to a vast range of industry-leading technologies atop its own offerings.
With a wide global presence, Equinix has secured a path to continued success by its ability to keep abreast of developments in the space. The company is comfortably positioned to remain a robust and leading player across multiple growth avenues and can be expected to make more smart developments and partnerships in the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Adaire Fox-Martin
(CEO & President)Prior to becoming CEO of Equinix in 2024, Adaire spent nearly 3 years at Google in various roles, including Head of Google Ireland and President of Google Cloud Go to Market. She also spent nearly 14 years at SAP and over 18 years at Oracle Corporation.
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