Description
Who are we?Auction Technology Group (ATG) is transforming the multi-billion-dollar global auction industry. Our platforms connect thousands of auction houses with buyers in over 170 countries, powering more than $15 billion in annual sales. Through innovative online auction technologies, we help auctioneers expand their reach, boost efficiency, and maximize value—while giving bidders unrivaled access to rare and specialized items.
As a publicly traded company, ATG has scaled from $18 million to $170 million in revenue, with sustained growth beyond the pandemic. We're modernizing one of the last industries to fully go digital—building a global, category-defining business in the process.
ATG's DevOps Engineering team is the platform backbone behind 8 global auction marketplaces. As Staff Engineer, being a part of our Infrastructure Engineering team, you will set the technical direction for ATG's infrastructure and platform function — defining standards, driving the multi-year roadmap, and serving as the senior technical authority across both the Infrastructure Engineering and Unified Operations teams.
What distinguishes this role is not just infrastructure depth — it's the ability to bring that depth into rooms where developers live. You will be the person development squads turn to when they need infrastructure guidance, not because it's your job title, but because you've earned the technical credibility to be listened to. Standards don't propagate through mandate at ATG; they propagate through trust. You will build that trust by knowing both sides of the stack, communicating clearly across the engineering organization, and writing the kind of technical guidance that developers actually want to follow.
This role sits at the intersection of Infrastructure Engineering and product development. It requires an engineer who is as comfortable reviewing a developer's Kubernetes deployment manifests as they are defining the platform policy that governs them.
The technical mandate is hands-on and multi-domain: CI/CD standardization, cloud infrastructure architecture, IaC at scale, observability, and developer experience across 8 marketplaces. At Staff level, success is measured by whether the work outlasts your direct involvement — whether the standards you set, the engineers you develop, and the architectural decisions you make hold up as the organization grows.
This is a foundational hire within ATG's 2026–2027 DevOps restructuring. You will join a newly formed Infrastructure Engineering team at a moment when the platform culture, toolchain standards, and cross-functional operating model are still being defined — and you will have significant influence over all three.
Key Responsibilities
What You'll DoTechnical Strategy & Infrastructure Roadmap
Build/drive the 2-year Infrastructure Engineering technical strategy — defining what ATG's infrastructure and platform function should look like, what capabilities it will build, and what it will stop doing.
Author technical strategy documents and present them to engineering leadership for ratification. Be accountable for the choices, not just the authorship.
Identify which platform investments generate the highest leverage across all 8 marketplaces and build the case — in business risk language — for prioritisation.
Define the standards deprecation roadmap: which tooling divergences to resolve, in which order, and by when.
Continuously scan the industry for emerging infrastructure and platform engineering patterns. Bring informed, opinionated recommendations rather than a list of options.
Cross-Functional Technical Governance & Developer Partnership
Be the infrastructure technical partner to development squads — not embedded in one team, but accessible to all. Attend sprint planning and architecture reviews where infrastructure decisions are being made. Catch problems before they become production incidents.
Set platform policy — the guardrails within which development teams make their own infrastructure decisions. Enforce standards through technical review and well-written guidance, not mandate. A standard that developers don't adopt has failed regardless of how well it's written.
Communicate infrastructure constraints in developer language: frame IaC requirements, networking boundaries, and deployment patterns in terms of developer outcomes — speed, reliability, self-service capability — not infrastructure principles.
Be the escalation point when teams want to diverge from platform standards. Assess the risk, make the call, document the decision, and explain the reasoning in terms the requesting team can accept even if they disagree.
Represent Infrastructure Engineering in architecture review boards, engineering leadership forums, and cross-marketplace technical decisions.
Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives: hiring bar calibration, engineering principle definition, and company-wide technical decision forums.
Cloud Infrastructure Architecture
Contribute to ATG's cloud infrastructure governance standards and guardrails — the patterns for compute, networking, storage, and managed services that development teams build against across AWS (primary) and Azure/GCP.
Involved in network architecture standards: VPC design, subnet strategy, traffic routing, load balancer configuration, CDN integration, and DNS architecture across marketplace environments.
Maintain the cloud infrastructure security posture standards: IAM design, secrets management architecture, network segmentation, and compliance guardrails (policy-as-code enforced, not advisory).
Establish disaster recovery and business continuity standards — RPO/RTO targets, failover architecture, and runbook requirements — across all production environments.
CI/CD Platform Engineering
Be a core contributor to ATG's CI/CD golden path strategy — define the direction and govern the standardized rollout across all 8 marketplaces (Q1–Q3 2027).
Drive deployment lead time from 2.1 days to under 1 day within 15 months. Define the measurement framework, track progress, and course-correct.
Design reusable pipeline templates and abstractions that developers adopt with minimal friction. The quality test: a developer on a new marketplace should be able to ship their first pull request through the golden path pipeline within one day of onboarding.
Establish deployment quality gates: automated testing integration, change failure rate targets, and rollback trigger standards.
Define DORA metric targets for ATG and own the reporting framework used to track engineering delivery performance.
Observability Strategy & Standardisation
Define ATG's observability standard: unified logs, metrics, and distributed traces across all marketplaces using Dynatrace.
Set the SLO/SLA framework — the definitions, the thresholds, the review cadence, and the escalation model.
Make observability a developer capability, not just an ops capability: define instrumentation standards and golden path integrations so development teams can implement traces and custom metrics without requiring DevOps involvement for each service.
Govern implementation methods. Ensure the chosen stack is commercially sound, operationally viable, and adoptable by teams with varying maturity levels.
Establish alerting standards and mean time to detection targets.
Developer Experience & Platform Adoption
Define ATG's developer experience strategy: what does a great day look like for a developer building on ATG's platform, and what is InfraEng's role in making that possible?
Measure platform adoption quantitatively. Treat golden-path adoption as a product metric. Own the feedback loop between developer experience and platform investment decisions. Decline to invest in capabilities developers won't use.
Run architecture reviews for development squads: advise on infrastructure decisions, surface non-obvious constraints, and remove blockers that require senior technical authority to resolve.
Write infrastructure guidance that developers want to read: internal docs, runbooks, and decision records written at the right level of abstraction — detailed enough to be useful, brief enough to be used.
Contribute to the InfraEng roadmap with data-driven prioritization and a product mindset.
Developing Engineers & Engineering Culture
Actively develop the Senior engineers on both DevOps teams, everything from reviewing architectural designs, enforcing standardized processes, coaching technical influence and communication, and creating growth opportunities.
Define the engineering culture and standards you want the InfraEng team to embody. Model it in every design review, hiring decision, and team interaction.
Contribute to hiring bar calibration across the engineering organization. Participate in interview panels and provide structured, comparative feedback.
Write for internal audiences: technical strategy documents, engineering principles, decision records. Writing is a core leadership tool at Staff level, and the quality of your writing directly determines how much of your thinking survives contact with a distributed engineering organization.
Key Requirements
What We're Looking ForRequired
8+ years in Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, or SRE, with at least 3 years in a senior or staff-level capacity.
Demonstrated experience owning a technical roadmap or multi-year infrastructure strategy at team or department level — not just contributing to one.
Proven ability to earn and maintain technical credibility with software engineers. You have worked closely with development squads — in architecture reviews, sprint planning, or technical consultation — and developers have changed how they build things based on your guidance. References can speak to this specifically.
Track record of driving technical adoption across engineering organizations: setting infrastructure standards that other teams actually follow, and navigating the organizational dynamics required to make that happen without authority.
Experience influencing technical direction with senior stakeholders (Directors, VPs, or equivalent) through written strategy documents and structured verbal advocacy.
Deep cloud infrastructure architecture experience — AWS required: compute (EC2, ECS, Lambda), networking (VPC design, ALB/NLB, Route 53, CloudFront), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), IAM, and managed database services. Multi-cloud (Azure/GCP) valued at this level, not optional.
Strong IaC background — Terraform required. Ability to define module architecture, policy-as-code standards, and drift detection approach. Not just writing modules — owning the program.
Deep hands-on experience designing and operating CI/CD platforms at scale (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite, or equivalent). Able to both set the strategy and validate the implementation.
Experience defining observability standards using OpenTelemetry or equivalent. Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks and how to implement them operationally.
Proficiency in DORA metrics as a measurement and improvement framework — must be able to define targets and build the reporting infrastructure, not just interpret results.
Proficiency in at least one scripting or backend language: Python, Go, or TypeScript.
Kubernetes platform experience (EKS, GKE, or AKS) at the standard-setting level — able to define how containerized workloads should be structured and operated, and explain those standards to developers in terms they find useful.
Demonstrated ability to develop Senior engineers through design review, technical coaching, structured feedback, and growth opportunities.
Exceptional written communication: writes clear, precise technical guidance for developer audiences and clear, persuasive strategy documents for engineering leadership. Can calibrate the same underlying concept to both.
Preferred
Experience operating in a marketplace, e-commerce, or multi-tenant SaaS platform context.
Hands-on experience with ephemeral/preview environments (per-PR environments using Namespace.so, Okteto, or similar) at the platform design level.
Experience with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Sentinel, Checkov) as a platform governance mechanism.
Background in distributed, globally-distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.
Public technical contributions: conference talks, published writing, open source maintainership, or internal thought leadership recognized outside the immediate team.
Experience in post-merger or restructuring engineering environments where infrastructure standards need to be established from scratch across multiple inherited systems.
Auction Technology Group is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
The pay range for this role is $170,000 to $185,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor.
The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.
