Staff Engineer

At Evolve, we’re on a mission to make vacation rental easy for everyone. Our high-performing, customer-obsessed team runs on curiosity, communication, and accountability—working together to create exceptional experiences for our owners and guests. Whether solving big challenges, delivering outstanding results, or celebrating wins, we approach every day with purpose and passion. If you’re ready to join a mission-driven company where every teammate has the opportunity to thrive, Evolve might just be the place for you.

Why this role

We're looking for a highly motivated Staff Engineer to join our Engineering Team to help us build, secure, and scale the infrastructure that powers Evolve end-to-end. You will be a sought-out engineer for the most impactful and broad-ranging problems — from driving DevOps transformation and architecting secure, reliable systems to setting the standard for how we adopt and critically evaluate emerging AI tooling. This is a critical role where you will regularly influence the direction of platform architecture across multiple teams and domains, lead initiatives that tackle systemic tech debt, and ensure cross-functional dependencies and risks are well understood and effectively managed. If you do your best work when the problems are hard, the stakes are high, and the work shapes how an entire engineering organization operates — this role is for you.

What you’ll do

• Drive DevOps transformation — lead CI/CD pipeline design and optimization, container orchestration strategy (Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure reliability — establishing patterns that scale across teams and reduce friction from code to production.
• Champion a security-first culture — architect secure infrastructure by default: secrets management, IAM least-privilege, vulnerability scanning, and compliance controls embedded as guardrails, not gates — and hold the bar across every system the team touches.
• Apply AI tooling with rigor — leverage AI-assisted development to accelerate platform work while modeling the critical evaluation practices the team needs: validating output, stress-testing assumptions, and setting the standard for responsible AI use at the frontier.
• Own platform reliability end-to-end — set and drive SLOs/SLAs for business-critical infrastructure, lead incident response, and systematically reduce MTTD/MTTR through automated observability, actionable alerting, and rigorous post-incident follow-through.
• Lead infrastructure as code at scale — design scalable, reusable IaC modules (Terraform/Pulumi) that encode organizational standards, reduce toil, and proactively address broad-ranging tech debt through incremental, well-scoped initiatives.
• Define and drive architectural direction — serve as the primary decision-maker for platform architecture across multiple teams and domains, regularly influencing systems design and ensuring alignment with engineering goals and organizational strategy.
• Deliver high-leverage solutions using emerging technology — stay current with industry practices and the architectures powering modern platforms; bring that knowledge to bear in delivering the most impactful, broad-ranging solutions available — not just the familiar ones.
• Optimize cloud architecture for reliability and cost — evaluate resource utilization, identify efficiency opportunities, and advise on tradeoffs across reliability, cost, and performance in close partnership with product and engineering leadership.
• Manage cross-functional dependencies and risk — identify and surface cross-team dependencies early, ensure shared understanding of risk, and drive effective change management across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the technical floor — actively develop platform engineering craft through code review, architectural guidance, and clear documentation; recruit high-performing senior engineers and help the team grow into broader scope and impact.

What makes you a great fit

• 8-12+ years in Platform Engineering, SRE, or DevOps roles
• Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)
• Strong container orchestration experience (Kubernetes, Docker)
• CI/CD pipeline design and optimization (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
• Cloud platform expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — architecture, cost optimization, IAM
• Observability tooling experience (Sumo, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or similar)
• Track record improving reliability metrics (MTTD/MTTR, uptime)
• Security-conscious infrastructure design — secrets management, least privilege, vulnerability scanning, compliance awareness
• Strong proficiency using AI tools to accelerate code development, triage, and maintenance, balanced with strong fundamentals to critically evaluate AI-generated output
• Strong scripting/automation skills (Python, Go, or Bash)
• Experience driving cross-functional technical initiatives and organizational adoption
• Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure considerations
• Experience owning production reliability for a business-critical service
• You have a knack for finding solutions to problems - and using a full arsenal of debugging tools