About Compa

Compa is a venture-backed AI startup revolutionizing the future of compensation.

In a dynamic job market with hiring challenges, accountability, and the rise of AI, companies need the best data to stay ahead of industry changes, competition, and costs. Compa has developed the premier real-time compensation data platform, delivering top-tier compensation intelligence to leading enterprise teams.

Compa is a compensation intelligence company built to augment enterprise compensation teams in the era of AI.

Our customers include the world’s biggest companies: NVIDIA, Stripe, DoorDash, Open AI, TMobile, Moderna, Workday, Ulta, Target, and more.

Locations:

Compa headquarters are located in Irvine, California, with growing sites in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California. We’re a collaborative, curious, and driven team that values transparency, ownership, and continuous learning and prioritizing in person work where possible.

The role

As a Staff Engineer on the Platform team, you'll own and lead platform engineering across our cloud, data, and AI/ML systems. Multi-cloud is central to what we're building, not a future initiative!

You'll work closely with your teammates and engineering leadership to set direction, and build the foundation that lets every team at Compa move fast, strategically. This is a high-ownership individual contributor role where your decisions shape how the enterprise builds and ships.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and maintain core infrastructure across cloud, data, and AI/ML systems

• Own and evolve Compa's Kubernetes-based platforms across AWS, GCP, and Azure

• Drive multi-cloud initiatives including cloud abstraction patterns, cross-cloud identity, networking, data movement, traffic routing, and customer-managed encryption keys

• Define platform standards for Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload isolation, tenancy, networking, security, scaling, upgrades, and operational ownership

• Scale and automate infrastructure services and internal tooling

• Raise the bar on reliability and observability through SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, and incident response

• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, infrastructure automation and paved paths for engineering teams

• Lead platform efforts that reduce developer toil and improve velocity

• Partner with leadership on technical direction and roadmap

• Act as a multiplier, setting standards that help engineers around you level-up

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong emphasis on infrastructure and platform development

• Deep, hands-on experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or AKS) - cluster architecture, networking, scaling, upgrades and production operations

• Strong Python skills applied to infrastructure tooling and backend systems

• Hands-on experience designing and operating production systems across at least two of AWS, GCP, and Azure; this is a must-have

• Experience managing infrastructure across cloud boundaries: identity, networking, data, traffic routing, and failover

• Observability tooling experience such as Prometheus, Grafana,, OpenTelemetry, Loki or ELK, Jeager, or Tempo

• Comfortable with high ownership and ambiguity - you've built things without a playbook before

Nice to have

• DevOps and SRE practices: infrastructure as code, CI/CD, incident response

• Security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, encryption, least privilege

• Exposure to MLOps

• Early-stage startup experience