About this role.
OpenSea is hiring a Staff Platform Engineer to build and evolve the infrastructure, platform services, internal tooling, and operational foundations supporting its products. The role owns complex systems end to end, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, developer experience, observability, CI/CD, and cloud operations. Candidates need 7+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, strong Kotlin or Java fluency, and demonstrated distributed-systems expertise. The position emphasizes independent technical judgment, cross-team enablement, and practical use of AI tools to improve engineering workflows and software quality.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Cover letter sample
Dear Hiring Team,
I am excited to apply for the Staff Platform Engineer role at OpenSea. I bring deep experience designing scalable backend platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and observability practices that help product teams ship reliable software quickly.
I am particularly drawn to OpenSea’s emphasis on extreme ownership and AI-enabled engineering workflows, and I would bring a pragmatic, systems-oriented approach to improving developer experience, operational excellence, and platform resilience.
I would welcome the opportunity to help build the technical foundations that enable OpenSea’s teams to create secure, high-performing products at scale.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Sample interview questions
I would begin by defining service-level objectives tied to user and business impact, then instrument the critical request paths with metrics, logs, traces, and actionable alerts. I would prioritize high-signal dashboards and runbooks, continuously tune alert thresholds to reduce noise, and use incident reviews to identify systemic reliability improvements.
I would make the pipeline fast, deterministic, and easy to use by standardizing reusable build templates, adding parallelized test execution, caching dependencies, and creating clear feedback for failures. I would introduce quality gates incrementally, measure pipeline duration and flake rates, and partner with product teams so controls improve safety without blocking delivery unnecessarily.
I would clarify the system’s goals, constraints, traffic profile, failure modes, and operational requirements before proposing an architecture. I would document trade-offs, favor simple and operable components where possible, validate assumptions through prototypes or load tests, and establish metrics that show whether the solution meets reliability and scalability goals.
I would use AI tools to accelerate low-risk tasks such as code exploration, test generation, documentation, incident summarization, and identifying potential regressions, while maintaining human review for architecture, security, and production changes. I would also create guardrails around data access, evaluation quality, and reproducibility so AI increases engineering confidence rather than introducing hidden risk.
I would first stabilize the incident by assessing impact, mitigating customer harm, and communicating a clear status cadence. After recovery, I would lead a blameless review focused on contributing technical and process factors, then convert findings into prioritized, owned actions such as resilience improvements, better alerts, runbooks, and automated safeguards.
OpenSea is building the gateway to the onchain economy – a rich world of communities, assets & creative expression uniquely possible with native digital ownership. Our products support millions of users and have helped shape onchain markets that exist today—and we’re just getting started.
Our goal is to build the highest-leverage, most AI-native team in crypto (and ideally beyond.) We believe that a small team (broken into even smaller teams with extreme ownership) can accomplish enormous results with the right people, the right tools, and the right company-wide investments in AI. We are building that team.
We’re looking for a highly skilled, curious, and self-driven Staff Platform Engineer to help build the technical foundations that power OpenSea. In this role, you’ll design and evolve the platform, services, and infrastructure that enable our engineering teams to build, deploy, and operate products quickly, reliably, and at scale. You’ll partner closely with product engineers to improve developer experience, system performance, and operational excellence while helping evolve the AI-enabled workflows, engineering systems, and technical foundations that make our entire team more effective builders.
Responsibilities
In the age of AI, Platform teams have two main roles – architect, build, and maintain critical systems, and enable the rest of the team to work safely and productively across your areas of ownership. Our goal is to make the systems protect themselves and enable everyone to build quickly.
Design, build, and evolve the platform services, infrastructure, and internal tooling that power OpenSea’s products
Own complex technical systems from definition through implementation, balancing scalability, reliability, maintainability, and developer experience
Bring best-in-class observability, monitoring and alerting to all of the systems at OpenSea
Maintain and improve AI skills & tools to make our systems more accessible, introspectable and easy to contribute to
Accelerate and expand CI coverage to improve correctness and AI verifiability
Partner closely with product teams to accelerate build & deployment of critical products (where your agents can’t yet!)
Build and ship high-quality, reliable software leveraging AI, modern development tools, and strong engineering judgment
Requirements
7+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale backend or platform systems
Strong fluency in JVM languages such as Kotlin or Java
Experience designing and operating distributed systems, backend services, and modern cloud infrastructure
Strong understanding of platform engineering principles, developer tooling, CI/CD, observability, and operational best practices
Demonstrated ability to own complex, ambiguous technical problems and deliver thoughtful, scalable solutions
Excitement for making independent technical decisions balancing reliability, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability
Experience leveraging AI tools and workflows to improve engineering quality, efficiency, and team effectiveness
Passion for Web3, digital ownership, AI, or other emerging technologies
The base salary for this full-time position, spanning multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges from $190,000 to $345,000 USD for candidates based in the United States and $161,500 to $293,250 USD for candidates based in the European Union, plus benefits & equity. Compensation for candidates based outside of the US and EU will vary to reflect local market conditions.
If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria above but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we’re looking for someone who is excited to join the team.
#LI-Remote
Benefits & Perks
🏥 Health Benefits: We cover 100% Dental/Vision/Medical for employees and 90% for dependents
🌴 Flexible Time Off Policy: Our flexible time off policy is aimed at letting our employees take as much time off as they’d like to refresh so long as it doesn’t interfere with their ability to meet their goals and contribute effectively to company velocity
👶 Parental Leave: 16 Weeks of Paid Parental Bonding & up to 8 additional weeks for the birthing parent
💛 Mental Health: We offer access to Spring Health, covering 8 therapy & 8 coaching sessions per year
📅 11 Company Holidays
🏦 Fidelity 401K Plan
📱 Internet/Mobile Reimbursement Plan
🧘 Reimbursement or Monthly Snack Delivery
✈ Company & Team retreats to get together for fun and collaboration
☕ Team Member Co-Working and Gathering Expense
🖥 MacBook Pro & WFH Stipend to make sure you are set up for success
🌯 Weekly $50 Uber Eats credit
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