Platform Engineer II

The role

This role sits on the Compute team, which develops and runs the foundational infrastructure behind Duolingo's applications. The engineer builds reusable self-service tooling and templates so product engineers can release features with less operational risk.

What you would do

• Create and run core compute building blocks on Kubernetes that span several regions and cloud vendors.
• Refine the path code takes from commit to live environments, using GitOps-style practices to make releases quicker and less risky.
• Set reliability targets, build monitoring dashboards and alerting, author operational runbooks, and take part in on-call rotations and incident response.
• Package platform capabilities into reusable components that other teams can adopt without hands-on help.

What they asked for

• Solid problem-solving instincts and a track record of shipping practical fixes into live systems.
• Working knowledge of distributed systems concepts such as network behavior, inter-service calls, failure patterns, and caching or storage tradeoffs.
• Prior hands-on time with live production systems, gained through employment, internships, or significant open-source contributions.
• Familiarity with at least one CI/CD platform and an infrastructure-as-code tool.
• Strong ability to communicate in writing and speech, including producing documentation and runbooks and working with other teams.
• Basic competence in Linux administration and scripting automation.

Nice to have

• A bachelor's degree in computer science or an adjacent technical discipline, or comparable hands-on experience in its place.
• Background operating production infrastructure on a major public cloud such as AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, or Azure.
• Familiarity with running workloads across several clusters or regions and the practices that keep such setups stable.
• Hands-on experience with service mesh and zero-trust network controls, such as mutual TLS, traffic routing rules, and authorization policies in Istio.