Lead Platform Engineer – Kubernetes / Go

Location: Remote OR Hybrid from Amsterdam ABOUT STREAM Stream powers real-time Chat https://getstream.io/chat/, Video https://getstream.io/video/, Activity Feeds https://getstream.io/activity-feeds/, and AI Moderation https://getstream.io/moderation/ for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience. The Role We're looking for a hands-on Go engineer with deep Kubernetes knowledge to help build the platform that runs Stream's real-time services. You'll work directly with a small, senior team, writing the automation and tooling that makes our infrastructure reliable, scalable, and fast to build on. This is a software engineering role, not an operations one. You'll spend most of your time writing Go and building platform systems — not configuring clusters by hand. Why This Role Exists Our backend runs at high scale and our platform is evolving quickly. We want a strong engineer who builds infrastructure as software — someone who understands Kubernetes deeply enough to extend it, automate it, and make it work for our teams, rather than simply operate it. What You'll Work On - Platform tooling and automation — build the systems, services, and automation that other engineers rely on to ship and run software safely at scale. - Kubernetes-native engineering — work at the level of the control plane: automation, custom tooling, and the infrastructure primitives that make our platform consistent and self-serve. - Reliability and scalability — strengthen the systems all of Stream's products depend on, with a focus on performance, resilience, and developer experience. Beyond that, you'll help define engineering standards for the platform and collaborate with product and SDK engineers to keep building on Stream fast and reliable. Core Technologies Go · Kubernetes · Helm · Terraform · AWS · PostgreSQL · CockroachDB · Redis · Prometheus / observability stack Required - Strong, current Go — Go is a primary language for you and has been recently. We're looking for genuine depth, not occasional contributions alongside another stack. - Deep Kubernetes knowledge — you understand how Kubernetes works internally (the control plane, controllers, CRDs) and have built automation or platform tooling on top of it, not just deployed workloads into a cluster someone else maintains. - Distributed systems fluency — concurrency, consensus trade-offs, and designing services that are reliable under load. - A builder's mindset — you still write code daily and prefer solving infrastructure problems in software over manual operations. Strong Plus - You've written Kubernetes operators or controllers (controller-runtime, kubebuilder, Operator SDK) or authored CRDs — this is the strongest signal for this role. - Experience with Helm and Terraform - Open source contributions to infrastructure or platform tooling, especially in the Kubernetes ecosystem - Engineering blog posts or conference talks on platform or distributed systems topics - Prior experience at an API-first or infrastructure-enabling scaleup What We're Not Looking For Being explicit saves everyone time: - Operate-only DevOps / SRE — if you run clusters but haven't built software on top of Kubernetes, the core of this role will feel unfamiliar. - Configuration-heavy backgrounds — Helm and Terraform are tools, not an engineering foundation; we need someone who builds, not just configures. - Go as a second language — one Go service in an otherwise Python/Java career isn't the depth we're after. - Hands-off leadership — this is an IC role for someone who codes; managers who no longer build day-to-day won't find what they're looking for here. - AI skepticism — we won't spend time convincing you AI is worth adopting. Benefits (Netherlands-based employees): - Ge