Staff Engineer - DevOps

Location: Poland only, fully remote Job Type: B2B, full time Overview Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We care about each customer's interaction, experience, behaviour, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically. Rooted in the kindred spirits of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the new Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known all over the world as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space. What’s the position? We are looking to engage a Staff DevOps Engineer on a B2B basis to help set the technical direction for our internal developer platform at Hard Rock Digital. This is a senior technical leadership engagement: you’ll help own the long-term architecture and roadmap for our internal developer platform, built on Backstage, and drive its adoption across every team in our organization. Where our Senior Platform Engineers build the golden paths and self-service capabilities, you’ll define which capabilities matter most, how the platform should evolve, and how we measure success—turning platform engineering from a set of useful tools into a strategic lever for the whole company’s engineering velocity. You’ll work with DevOps, SRE, security, and product engineering teams to build consensus on standards and drive multi-quarter initiatives. You’ll also set the bar for what AI-enabled engineering looks like at Hard Rock Digital: fluently using AI coding assistants, agentic tooling, and LLM-powered workflows yourself, and championing their adoption—including embedding AI-assisted workflows directly into the platform (e.g. AI-assisted scaffolding, incident triage, or documentation generation via Backstage) so every engineer benefits. What will you do? The scope of services under this engagement includes: Contribute to the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for our internal developer platform (Backstage), including catalog strategy, plugin architecture, and platform APIs. Set company-wide standards for golden paths, self-service workflows, and "paved road" patterns spanning infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, environments, and observability. Make build-vs-buy and platform-investment decisions, evaluating Backstage plugins, third-party IDP tooling, and custom development against engineering-wide impact and cost. Partner with engineering leadership across product, SRE, security, and data teams to align the platform roadmap with company-wide priorities and identify the highest-leverage investments. Define and report on platform health and developer experience (DevEx) metrics—DORA metrics, self-service adoption rates, lead time to production, ticket deflection—and use them to prioritize the roadmap. Drive adoption of the platform across teams, including migration strategies for legacy infrastructure and workflows onto self-service, Backstage-based patterns. Architect complex, cross-cutting infrastructure and platform capabilities (multi-account AWS, EKS/Kubernetes platform primitives, Terraform/Terragrunt module ecosystems) that other engineers build on top of. Champion security, compliance, and guardrail-by-design practices at the platform level, ensuring self-service capabilities are secure and compliant by default across a regulated, global environment. Champion and scale AI-enabled engineering practices org-wide—evaluating and rolling out AI coding assistants and agentic tooling, embedding AI-assisted workflows into the platform itself, and helping teams adopt AI-enabled ways of working as a default, not an exception. What are we looking for? We’re seeking a seasoned platform engineering leader who has built or scaled an internal developer platform before and understands both the technical depth and the organizational change management required to make self-service actually stick. You should be comfortable operating with significant scope and ambiguity, influencing without direct authority, and translating platform investment into measurable engineering-wide outcomes. Critically, you’re someone who has embraced AI tooling as a genuine force multiplier at both an individual and organizational level—and who can articulate and drive that vision for others. The ideal contractor will have: 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering, with 3+ years in a senior, staff, or equivalent technical leadership capacity. Demonstrated experience owning the architecture and roadmap for an internal developer platform at scale—Backstage strongly preferred—including catalog design, plugin ecosystems, and platform extensibility patterns. A track record of driving org-wide adoption of self-service workflows and golden paths, including change management across multiple engineering teams. Expert-level knowledge of AWS services and cloud-native architectures (multi-account setups, VPC design, IAM policies, networking) at an organizational scale. Deep experience with Kubernetes (EKS preferred), Docker, and Helm, including designing platform-level abstractions on top of container orchestration. Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise using Terraform/Terragrunt, with experience designing module ecosystems consumed by many teams via self-service. Strong scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, TypeScript/ Node.js for Backstage plugin development) and experience architecting extensible platform tooling. Experience setting CI/CD strategy and standards across an engineering organization, with tools such as GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, TeamCity, or comparable. Strong understanding of observability, DevEx measurement, and how to translate platform investment into metrics leadership cares about (DORA metrics, lead time, adoption rates). Deep knowledge of networking, security hardening, and compliance in regulated industries, with experience embedding these as default, automated guardrails at the platform level. A track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or the broader organization. AWS Professional Certification (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or SysOps Administrator) strongly preferred. Demonstrated fluency with AI development tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) and a point of view on how to responsibly scale AI-enabled engineering practices across an organization, including embedding AI-assisted workflows into internal platforms. The ability to operate at, and drive others toward, AI-enabled development velocity is a core expectation of this engagement, not a nice-to-have.