Platform Engineer II

Join us in building tools that help people make smarter decisions about land, water, and climate. Our platform, ZENTRA Cloud, collects environmental measurements from METER devices in the field around the world, stores them, and serves them through web applications and APIs to researchers, growers, and weather monitoring agencies. The platform handles about 350,000 device uploads and more than 10 million readings per day. As a Platform Engineer (internal job title: Software Engineer II), you will build and operate the infrastructure under that data. You will work alongside the technical lead, who retains primary responsibility for production infrastructure. As you gain familiarity with the platform, you will take on increasing responsibility for its operation, reliability, and improvement. Our platform runs on on-premises infrastructure using Docker, GitLab CI, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and established monitoring and logging tools, with AWS SQS for message queuing. We use AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex in daily engineering work. You will use these tools to develop infrastructure changes and automation, while remaining responsible for reviewing, testing, and validating the results. On the application there is a question about your favorite hobby. Please write the word "Banana" followed by your hobby.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines for backend services and databases.
• Operate containerized services for on-premises infrastructure.
• Keep databases and core services highly available.
• Manage infrastructure as code and automate manual operational tasks.
• Build and improve observability through proactive monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Help secure the platform through secrets management, access control, and system hardening.
• Take part in architecture decisions.
• Troubleshoot infrastructure and deployment problems, and implement fixes to reduce recurrence.
• Write and maintain runbooks and technical documentation.

Required Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, DevOps, or SRE roles.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and containerized applications in production.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, preferably with GitLab CI.
• Linux administration skills and a good understanding of networking (DNS, TLS, load balancing, firewalls).
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Scripting skills in Bash or Python.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating PostgreSQL or MongoDB in production.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• Experience with container orchestration such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.
• Experience with a major cloud provider such as AWS.
• Exposure to IoT or high-volume data ingestion systems.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents in daily engineering work.

Key Competencies

• Ownership and initiative, with the motivation to both maintain and improve a critical platform.
• Sound judgment when reviewing and validating changes to production infrastructure.
• Problem-solving skills and a focus on automation.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Collaboration across software, hardware, and support teams.
• Willingness to learn new tools and technologies.

Location On-site in Pullman, Washington. After Hours Support There is no formal on-call rotation. A company laptop is provided, and you may be asked to assist with urgent production issues outside normal working hours when you are available.