About the Role
As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will own architectural decisions, deliver large-scale infrastructure projects, and shape the technical direction of a platform that processes more real-time transactions than almost any system on earth. The vision is to build, scale, and maintain Index Cloud—a multi-tenant, globally distributed compute platform that serves both our exchange workloads and the workloads of every partner in our ecosystem. This is not incremental improvement; it's building a platform-as-a-product at internet scale.
Responsibilities
- Design and deliver multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure across bare-metal and public cloud.
- Build infrastructure-as-code frameworks that push changes across thousands of servers.
- Write standard libraries, SDKs, and platform APIs that every engineering team at Index Exchange depends on.
- Solve hard distributed systems problems including real-time bidding with sub-millisecond overhead, multi-datacenter consistency, safe deployment to thousands of servers, and load balancing at scale.
- Drive technical direction through RFCs and design reviews.
- Set standards for shared platform domains.
- Make architectural decisions on tooling, security posture, and system design.
- Influence engineering direction across multiple divisions.
- Build golden paths, self-service tooling, and platform APIs that let engineering teams ship without friction.
- Coach engineers, foster a culture of engineering excellence, and collaborate across Cloud Platform Operations, SRE, Network, Security, and Software Engineering teams.
Requirements
- Built and shipped platform infrastructure at scale, not just operated someone else's.
- Comfortable with ambiguity.
- Care about the developer experience of the platform as much as its architecture.
- 8+ years in platform engineering, SRE, infrastructure engineering, or DevOps.
- Deep experience with Linux internals: kernel tuning, network stack, system observability, security.
- Strong Kubernetes expertise: cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, RBAC, multi-cluster—across bare-metal and cloud (EKS, GKE).
- Infrastructure-as-code at scale: Terraform, Ansible, GitOps (ArgoCD or similar).
- Solid networking fundamentals (L2-L7), load balancing, DNS, service discovery.
- A track record of driving technical strategy across teams—not just executing within one.
Skills
- Go
- Python
- Linux internals
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Ansible
- GitOps
- ArgoCD
- Networking fundamentals
- Load balancing
- DNS
- Service discovery
- Distributed storage systems
- Big data infrastructure
- Observability stack design
- Secrets management
- Certificate management
- Access control
- Hybrid cloud architectures
- Bare-metal infrastructure
Location
- Toronto
- New York
- Montreal
- Kitchener
- London
- San Francisco
- Global cities
Work Type
- Full-time
- Global team
Experience Level
- Staff-level
- 8+ years
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans
- Paid time off, health days, and personal obligation days
- Flexible work schedules
- Competitive retirement matching plans
- Equity packages
- Generous parental leave
- Annual well-being allowance
- Fitness discounts
- Group wellness activities
- Commuter benefits and discounts
- Employee assistance program
- Mental health first aid program
- One day of volunteer time off per year
- Donation-matching program
- Multiple resources and programming to support continuous learning
About the Company
- Index Exchange is a global advertising supply-side platform that reinvents how digital advertising works at scale.
- They empower the world’s leading media owners and marketers to thrive in a programmatic, privacy-first ecosystem.
- They have over 20 years of experience accelerating the ad technology evolution.
- Their proprietary tech is trusted by some of the world’s largest brands and media owners.
- Their platform plays a crucial role in keeping the internet open, accessible, and largely free.
- They process more than 700 billion real-time auctions every day with ultra-low latency.
- Their platform is vertically integrated from servers to networks and runs primarily on their own metal and cloud infrastructure.
- They have an engineering-first culture where engineers tackle internet-scale problems across tight-knit, global teams.
- They move fast, build thoughtfully, and stay grounded in their core values.
Equal Opportunity
- Index Exchange is committed to equal employment opportunities.
- They celebrate diversity of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, or veteran status.
- Diversity is the human experience.
- For those who show grit, passion, and humility—Index will welcome you.
- Index Exchange welcomes and encourages individuals with disabilities to apply to work with them.
- Index Exchange will make reasonable efforts to ensure accommodation requests are met throughout the recruitment process.
