Staff Platform Engineer

Formenergy
Berkeley, CA
On-site

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience migrating legacy infrastructure to modern platforms and leading technical teams.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with experience in large-scale infrastructure migrations and leading cross-functional teams
    — “migrating a live legacy estate onto the platform, extending its reach into the parts of the company”
  • Individuals with a strong background in operating and scaling CI/CD and GitOps systems
    — “operating and scaling CI/CD and GitOps delivery systems, including leading incident response”
  • Candidates who can design and implement robust Day-2 operations for future-scale systems
    — “Design Day-2 operations for capacity, upgrades, and lifecycle at future scale.”

Things to consider

  • Relocation is possible but not guaranteed, as the role is based in Berkeley, CA.
    — “Relocation assistance is available.”
  • This role requires leading migrations without disrupting dependent teams.
    — “Minimize disruption to dependent teams and turn one-off migrations into repeatable patterns.”

How to stand out

  • Highlight your experience with legacy-to-modern infrastructure migrations in your resume and interviews.
    — “Demonstrated experience migrating production systems off legacy infrastructure”
  • Showcase your ability to lead incident response and drive structural fixes in complex environments.
    — “leading incident response in complex, multi-system environments and converting failures into structural fixes”
  • Emphasize your hands-on depth with AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code in your application materials.
    — “Wide-ranging hands-on depth across AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code”
  • Demonstrate your capacity to define and document integration patterns for toolchains.
    — “Extend the platform to new teams and toolchains, defining and documenting integration patterns.”
  • Show your ability to model and forecast cloud cost and capacity effectively.
    — “Model and forecast cloud cost and capacity.”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • lead migrations from legacy infrastructure
  • design migration strategy
  • extend platform to new teams
  • design Day-2 operations
  • build auditing for configuration drift
Typical background
DevOpscloud engineeringinfrastructure automation

Skills & requirements

Required

DevOpsGitopsIacPipeline DesignMonitoring And AlertingIncident ResponseAutomationConfiguration Management

Preferred

Cloud InfrastructureContainer Orchestration

Stack & domain

DevOpsGitopsInternal Developer PlatformConfiguration ManagementTelemetry PipelineDay-2 OperationsCapacity PlanningUpgradesLifecycle ManagementAuditingIacPipelineConfiguration StandardsMonitoringAlertingSlosIncident ResponsePostmortemsAutomationAgent WorkflowsRunbooksToolingLeadershipProblem-solvingCommunicationCollaborationTechnical LeadershipDesign ReviewsDecision-makingEnergy StorageElectric GridClean EnergyBattery Manufacturing

About the role

Original posting from Formenergy via Ashby

Are you ready to build America’s energy future? Form Energy is an American manufacturing and energy technology company. We’re revolutionizing energy storage with cost-effective, multi-day technology designed to keep the electric grid secure and reliable, even during extended periods of stress. By strengthening the electric system and reimagining what’s possible, we’re giving clean energy a whole new form! 

In recent years, Form Energy has earned a number of accolades, including being named by TIME as a “Best Invention”, MIT Technology Review as a “Top Climate Tech Company To Watch”, and Fast Company as “One of the Next Big Things In Tech”. We are making rapid progress on our mission of delivering energy storage for a better world, and our team is growing just as rapidly to meet demand. We have signed contracts with leading electric utilities across the United States and production of our iron-air batteries is underway at our first high-volume manufacturing facility in West Virginia.

Working for Form Energy is more than just a job, it’s a chance to be part of something extraordinary. And now - right as we significantly scale up battery manufacturing -  might be the most exciting moment in the company’s history to join. We are assembling a team of highly talented and driven individuals across the country. Driven by our core values of humanity, excellence, and creativity, our team is determined to deliver on our mission and transform the energy landscape for the better.

Feeling energized to make a meaningful impact on the world? Then keep reading - you’ve come to the right place.

ROLE DESCRIPTION

Our Engineering Automation & AI Toolchain team builds the internal developer platform that consists of Formation (our GitOps-driven internal developer platform), Patina (the toolchain and developer-experience layer) and Manifold (the configuration and telemetry pipeline that ties them together).

The design problem to solve is running it efficiently, comprehensively, and accurately, which means Day-2 operations engineered to hold up against company growth, product maturity, and the entropy that accumulates in anything left running. We are seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to own that problem: migrating a live legacy estate onto the platform, extending its reach into the parts of the company and toolchain it does not serve yet, and designing the operational regime that keeps all of it honest as it scales.

Relocation assistance is available.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

  • Lead migrations from legacy infrastructure to modern platforms, through decommissioning.
  • Design migration strategy, including sequencing, cutover, rollback, and validation.
  • Minimize disruption to dependent teams and turn one-off migrations into repeatable patterns.
  • Extend the platform to new teams and toolchains, defining and documenting integration patterns.
  • Design Day-2 operations for capacity, upgrades, and lifecycle at future scale.
  • Build auditing for configuration drift, dependency currency, and secret/certificate lifecycle.
  • Maintain and review IaC, pipeline, and configuration standards.
  • Design monitoring and alerting, and define SLOs with internal customers.
  • Lead complex incident response and drive postmortems to structural fixes.
  • Build automation and agent workflows with appropriate guardrails and human review.
  • Codify expertise into runbooks and tooling others can run.
  • Share technical leadership on design reviews, key decisions, and platform initiatives.
  • Mentor junior engineers and delegate effectively.
  • Partner with IT, Security, Data, and operations teams.
  • Write design docs, decision records, and standards.
  • Implement security and compliance controls, and automate audit evidence.
  • Model and forecast cloud cost and capacity.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

  • 7–10 years of related experience in infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering.
  • Demonstrated experience migrating production systems off legacy infrastructure and onto a new platform — sequencing, coexistence, cutover, and rollback — without disrupting the teams that depend on them.
  • Wide-ranging hands-on depth across AWS, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code — demonstrated experience resolving complex infrastructure problems that required in-depth evaluation of competing factors, not just applying a known procedure.
  • Demonstrated experience operating and scaling CI/CD and GitOps delivery systems, including leading incident response in complex, multi-system environments and converting failures into structural fixes.
  • Demonstrated experience leading technical work through others — directing engineers on an initiative, mentoring, and driving design review — and working effectively with partners outside your own area of expertise.
  • Enough hard-won depth to supervise AI-generated work: you can tell correct from merely plausible in infrastructure code and operational output, and you know which of its shortcuts are safe to take.

#LI-Onsite

Humanity is a cornerstone of Form Energy’s culture, and we make sure our compensation and benefits reflect that. Form Energy offers competitive salaries, stock options, and a holistic benefits package to ensure all employees have what they need to thrive while working here. 

When it comes to you and your family’s health, we cover 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees - and 80% of healthcare premiums for dependents. This starts from day one. We also offer at least 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents (up to 20 weeks for birthing parents), and generous vacation policies to give employees time to recharge when needed. 

To build America’s energy future, we need everyone at the table. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply to our open jobs.

If you may require reasonable accommodations to participate in our interview process, please contact accommodations@formenergy.com. Requests for accommodations will be treated with discretion.

Form Energy is committed to maintaining the privacy of our applicants. Please be aware that we will never solicit sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers or bank account details during the recruiting or hiring process.

Source: Formenergy careers (Ashby)

Similar roles