Software Engineer 2, Platform

About the Role

This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days a week in a CJ office location. You must be work authorized in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship.

About CJ Engineering

At CJ, we are passionate about software engineering. We build exciting software with quality and maintainability in mind, valuing common sense, simplicity, and efficiency. Our engineering principles include:

• Engineering autonomy: Business decisions are made by business people, and technical decisions are made by technical people.
• Full stack: Gain competence in every aspect of software engineering, from frontend to database, requirements analysis, testing, and technology selection.
• Clean, maintainable code: Code is read more often than it is written, so we prioritize writing it well.
• Pairing: High-quality code is produced through close collaboration, so we pair by default.
• TDD: Quality is baked into our process through Test-Driven Development.
• Ownership: Engineers own the full lifecycle of what they build—from design and implementation to deployment, monitoring, production support, and on-call rotations.
• Operational Excellence: We embrace Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automation, and observability to build reliable systems and deliver software safely, efficiently, and at scale.

We believe in Agile values, incremental development, and constant experimentation. We are committed to exploring how AI can amplify our productivity, viewing it as a force multiplier, not a replacement for good engineering.

Responsibilities

As a Software Engineer 2 on the Engineering Experience (EngExp) platform team, you will help run and improve the platform powering CJ's production systems across multiple AWS regions. This role is hands-on and operationally focused, involving well-scoped work across the following systems:

• Observability & monitoring: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry across production regions. You'll add and tune metrics, dashboards, and alert rules, learning how these systems behave at scale.
• Kubernetes & cloud infrastructure: Multi-region EKS clusters, including routine maintenance, node group changes, controller upgrades, and add-on configuration.
• AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, CIDR management, security groups, and Route53. You'll help maintain production networking and learn the multi-region topology.
• CI/CD & artifact management: GitLab CI/CD pipelines, GitOps delivery through ArgoCD, and the Nexus artifact repository.
• Access & identity: IAM roles, service accounts, Vault-managed secrets, and fulfilling access requests, with a focus on automating repetitive tasks.
• Cost observability: OpenCost and cleanup work (e.g., orphaned EBS volumes) to ensure costs are attributable.

Your day-to-day work will include:

• Picking up well-scoped platform work and shipping it end to end.
• Building and maintaining GitLab CI/CD pipelines and GitOps delivery through ArgoCD.
• Writing and reviewing infrastructure-as-code with Terraform for AWS resources.
• Adding and tuning observability tools like Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and Alertmanager rules.
• Helping fulfill and automate recurring requests (ingress, DNS, service accounts, IAM roles).
• Investigating platform incidents and documenting lessons learned.
• Learning to recognize common failure modes (IP exhaustion, resource limits, reconciliation lag) and escalating them early.

Technologies We Use

• Kubernetes / EKS (multi-cluster, multi-region), Karpenter, cert-manager, external-dns
• Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, OpenTelemetry (and long-term storage/sharding for Prometheus)
• AWS networking (VPC, VPC peering, Transit Gateway, Route53, NAT Gateway, security groups, subnet/CIDR design across accounts and regions)
• Terraform, AWS (IAM, EKS, S3, EBS)
• ArgoCD, GitLab CI/CD, Nexus (artifact registry), Docker, container image build pipelines
• Vault, OpenCost

Requirements

• 1-2 years of experience in software or infrastructure engineering.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• Comfortable in the terminal and reading YAML, Terraform, or similar declarative config.
• Some exposure to cloud (AWS or equivalent) and containers—production Kubernetes experience is a plus, not a requirement.
• Genuine interest in operating real systems, especially observability, and growing deep in them.
• Willingness to learn how systems fail and ask questions when something looks off.
• Effective communication; enjoys pair programming and code review.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on exposure to Kubernetes, Terraform, or GitLab/GitHub CI/CD.
• Experience with Prometheus/Grafana or another metrics stack.
• Scripting in Python, Bash, or Go.

What Success Looks Like

• You reliably deliver well-scoped platform work end to end with decreasing oversight.
• You build genuine depth in at least one system we own, not just familiarity with the tools.
• Other engineers find the workflows you touch easier and more predictable to use.

Benefits

• Competitive salaries and 401K matching.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible time off without accrual hassles.
• Generous number of paid holidays.
• Company-sponsored team-building events.
• Employee Referral Program.
• Annual recognition awards.
• Hybrid work arrangements for optimal work-life balance.
• Parental bonding leave.
• Backup care options for children and elders.
• Employee discount program.
• International SOS program for global support.
• Business Resource Groups for connecting over shared interests.

Pay

Compensation Range: USD $73,150.00 - USD $107,744.00/Annually. This range reflects the pay the Company believes it will offer for this position at the time of posting. Compensation will be determined based on skills, qualifications, and experience, along with the requirements of the position.

Schedule

This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days a week in a CJ office location.