Senior Platform Engineer

ABOUT THE TEAM: Talon.One’s R&D is a cross-functional group of engineers, product thinkers, and designers who build and scale the systems behind Talon.One’s platform. Each team owns a clear slice of our ecosystem, operating with autonomy, shared accountability, and a strong sense of ownership. Within R&D, the Platform Tribe focuses on enabling product teams to deliver value safely and efficiently. We build and evolve shared capabilities, including our Internal Developer Platform, CI/CD workflows, cloud foundations, and operational tooling. Our goal is to reduce friction, set clear guardrails, and give engineers a great default path from idea to production. We value curiosity, pragmatic problem-solving, and open collaboration. Teams have visibility into systems end-to-end, and we actively encourage mentoring, documentation, and knowledge sharing. Talon.One is committed to an inclusive environment in which diverse perspectives lead to better systems and decisions. We’re based in Berlin and welcome professionals already here or excited to relocate. ABOUT THE ROLE: We’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help us take our Internal Developer Platform and shared tooling to the next level. We already have solid foundations in place, including Backstage as our IDP, and now we’re focused on building meaningful capabilities on top of it that deliver tangible value to both the business and the engineering organization. This role combines technical leadership with strong product thinking. We don’t have a dedicated product manager for the platform, so you’ll work closely with engineering managers, technical leads, and engineers across teams, listen to their pain points, identify opportunities, and drive initiatives from idea to production. You’ll lead platform projects end to end: shaping the problem, designing solutions, implementing them, and ensuring they are adopted and maintained. You’ll collaborate closely with infrastructure, SRE, and product engineers, balancing long-term platform initiatives with iterative improvements. Success in this role means measurable improvements in developer experience, reliability, and delivery speed across the organization. ONCE YOU ARE HERE YOU WILL: Lead platform initiatives from scratch to production, owning problem definition, technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration. Build on top of our existing Internal Developer Platform (Backstage) by developing plugins, templates, workflows, and integrations that reduce cognitive load for product teams and other internal stakeholders. Actively engage with internal users, understand their needs, validate assumptions, and translate feedback into platform improvements. Design and maintain reusable tools, services, and abstractions that help teams deploy, operate, and scale their services safely. Make thoughtful architectural decisions and clearly articulate trade-offs among reliability, security, scalability, and developer experience. Partner with infrastructure and security teams to ensure platform capabilities align with operational and compliance requirements. Raise the bar for platform quality through documentation, standards, and mentoring. WHAT WE NEED YOU TO BRING TO THE TABLE: 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on platform, backend, or infrastructure-related work. Proven ability to lead technical initiatives independently and deliver production-grade systems with real users. Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures in a production environment. Practical experience with Internal Developer Platforms, developer tooling, or enabling infrastructure (Backstage experience is a strong plus). Solid understanding of CI/CD, GitOps concepts, and modern deployment workflows. Experience with cloud providers, preferably GCP, and infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or Terragrunt. Strong product mindset: you’re comfortable talking to users, prioritizing work based on impact, and ite