Software Engineer, Platform Engineering (L3)

This position is a critical engineering role within Twilio Platform Engineering, requiring a hands-on engineer capable of developing, deploying, and managing highly available, massive-scale distributed systems.

Our systems regularly process more than 12 billion emails during peak events like Black Friday, and our throughput requirements continue to scale rapidly. As an L3 engineer, you will build and operate resilient backend services at scale and contribute to the design and reliability of our dual-cloud infrastructure span across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. You'll run Kubernetes beyond the boundaries of managed services, automate infrastructure with Terraform, and write production code to help keep distributed systems healthy under real production load while using modern AI-assisted tooling to move faster.

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• WEAR THE CUSTOMER’S SHOES: Design, build, and operate services and automations to manage kubernetes clusters at scale. Partner closely with product management and technical leadership to break down complex system requirements into manageable, iterative milestones.
• BE AN OWNER (CODE QUALITY): Drive rigorous code reviews and push for maintainable patterns in our codebase, ensuring high testing standards (unit, integration, and component testing) are executed across the team and platform.
• BE AN OWNER (INFRASTRUCTURE & OBSERVABILITY): Manage and enhance cloud configurations across AWS and Azure environments utilizing Infrastructure as Code (Terraform). Ensure deep observability coverage by standardizing metrics, alerts, and distributed tracing across core data pipelines.
• CHAMPION ENGINEERING HEALTH: Advocate for a clean architectural foundation. Proactively identify technical debt, system bottlenecks, and single points of failure (SPOF), balancing feature delivery with critical platform refactoring.
• MENTOR AND LEAD: Foster a collaborative environment by mentoring junior engineers, leading technical sprint planning, and sharing expertise across distributed engineering nodes.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

Required:

• Experience: 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating resilient backend services at scale using Kubernetes. Experience with CAPI, EKS and managing zero-downtime Kubernetes cluster upgrades, including node draining, API deprecations, and PodDisruptionBudgets.
• Modern Development Workflow: Practical experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code) to accelerate code generation, automate testing, and streamline debugging workflows or strong desire to learn.
• Deployment Orchestration: Hands-on Experience implementing GitOps workflows with ArgoCD and automated pipeline orchestration with Harness (or an equivalent enterprise CI/CD platform).
• Language Proficiency: Strong, hands-on experience with Shell, Terraform, Yaml and Go (Golang).
• Cloud Infrastructure: Solid experience deploying and managing production workloads in cloud environments - ideally with deep exposure to AWS core services (such as EKS, EC2, S3) or their Microsoft Azure equivalents (such as AKS, Virtual Machines, Blob Storage). Understanding of container networking (VPC/VNet, pod IPAM, CNI plugins).
• Infrastructure as Code: Proficiency with Terraform for provision-level automation and maintaining environment parity.
• Distributed Systems: Strong theoretical and practical understanding of distributed datastores, caching layers, and asynchronous event streaming (e.g., Kafka or similar queuing ecosystems).
• Systems Mindset: Strong foundational background in computer science fundamentals, data structures, and building self-healing cloud architectures.

Desired:

• Prior experience managing high-throughput applications running inside containerized infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with advanced deployment strategies (canary, blue/green analysis).
• Experience with OPA/Gatekeeper or similar policy-as-code enforcement in Kubernetes.
• Experience implementing OpenTelemetry or distributed tracing systems across decoupled microservice platforms.
• Exposure to network topology, proxy layers, or mail transfer agent (MTA) protocol constraints.
• Aware and practical understanding of distributed datastores, caching layers, and asynchronous event streaming (e.g., Kafka or similar queuing systems).
• Multi-Cloud migration/operating experience.

Location

This role will be remote, but is not eligible to be hired in CA, CT, NJ, NY, PA, WA.

Travel

We prioritize connection and opportunities to build relationships with our customers and each other. For this role, you may be required to travel occasionally to participate in project or team in-person meetings.

What We Offer

Working at Twilio offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.