Staff Platform Engineer

Staff Platform Engineer

DeepL is a leading artificial intelligence company specializing in language technology and intelligent solutions for enterprise communication. Founded in 2017, the company now serves over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across more than 228 markets globally, with approximately 1,000 employees supported by prominent investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. DeepL's platform delivers human-quality translation, writing enhancement, and real-time voice translation capabilities.

The organization is recognized for combining advanced AI research with a collaborative culture centered on innovation and employee development. DeepL attracts global talent by fostering an environment where technical excellence meets meaningful work on products that impact millions of users worldwide. The company continues to expand its engineering teams across multiple locations while maintaining a commitment to sustainable growth and employee well-being.

You'll join the Platform Engineering team, which owns and operates the hybrid compute infrastructure supporting DeepL's products and research initiatives. This infrastructure spans Kubernetes control planes, node lifecycle management, networking, storage and core cluster services across both on-premises and cloud environments. The platform currently encompasses large on-prem GPU clusters for research, production inference nodes, and AWS regions globally, with the team working to deepen the hybrid model and provide unified self-service infrastructure for product and research teams.

What you'll do

• Own the reliability, capacity and cost efficiency of DeepL's CPU and GPU compute infrastructure across hybrid cloud and on-prem deployments, including hardware lifecycle management

• Shape platform architecture by developing strong technical positions, evaluating them with peers and driving decisions that serve the organization's best outcomes

• Design, build and operate production-grade Kubernetes clusters from initial design through long-term operations across cloud and on-prem infrastructure

• Drive technical initiatives to unify workload execution across on-prem hardware and AWS, supporting research teams as they adopt cloud-native approaches

• Establish infrastructure-as-code standards and platform conventions across the track while strengthening observability and security

• Mentor infrastructure engineers, elevate technical standards through design reviews and architecture discussions, and maintain platform maintainability

• Lead incident response for hybrid infrastructure systems, driving resolution to root cause and sustaining an on-call rotation

What you'll bring

• Deep hands-on Kubernetes expertise including cluster design, building and operating at scale throughout their full lifecycle

• Substantial experience with either public cloud or on-prem infrastructure at scale, with demonstrated credibility working across both. AWS experience preferred, bare-metal or data centre experience strongly valued

• Networking and Linux proficiency enabling you to debug problems from container through host to network edge

• Production experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform or equivalent, and GitOps delivery with tools such as ArgoCD

• Software engineering capability in Go or Python at the level of building tooling other engineers depend on

• Track record of technical ownership spanning multiple teams, creating clarity across boundaries, holding and adjusting positions based on evidence, and bringing other engineers along

• Strong incident management and reliability engineering discipline with an ownership mindset for building resilient systems

Nice to have

• GPU infrastructure experience for training or inference at scale

• Production experience with distributed storage systems such as Ceph

• Background serving researchers or data scientists as platform customers

• Hybrid or on-prem networking experience including BGP level work

What they offer

• International team spanning more than 90 nationalities across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, Japan and additional locations

• Open communication culture and regular feedback practices

• Hybrid work arrangement based in London