Associate Platform Engineer (College Grad 2027)

About the Role

You can’t help it: you see something that needs to be fixed, and you try to fix it. You want to pop open the hood, and see how it really works underneath. You don’t just want to get it going again, you want to improve it so that it doesn’t break in that particular way again.

Here at Solace’s Platform Engineering team, we believe the best platform engineers are generalists. That in order to build reliable, resilient, and anti-fragile systems, you need to understand how systems fail, and how to fix them. We’re looking for new grads with the potential to become expert troubleshooters, and help us build our cloud infrastructure.

This is an in-person role for new college graduates in our Redwood City office, 3 days a week. Start date: July 2027.

What you will do

• Help product and data engineers with their tooling and the internal developer platform
• Help monitor systems health and triage signals
• Participate in troubleshooting and applying fixes for outages along with the entire platform engineering team. While we don’t expect you to run solo on-call, we do expect you to tag along when systems break.
• Participate in postmortems, systems analysis and architectural review
• Ask questions

What you bring to the table

• Curiosity about technologies, how they work, and how they work with people.
• A relentless drive to dig deep into the problem and form a picture of what’s going on.
• Willingness to learn from mistakes and failures.
• Thinking sideways when obvious approaches are unsuitable.

What you will learn

• Get very comfortable on the command line and navigating Linux systems.
• How to gather information on broken systems, form hypotheses, test them, and implement fixes.
• How to use various mental frameworks to understand and evaluate systems and architecture, and identify patterns, and anti-patterns.
• How to build infrastructure with GCP, AWS, OpenTofu, and Kubernetes.

Sounds like you?

Maybe you're already hosting something for a club or for your friends. Maybe you tried building a homelab, and the parts that broke taught you more than the parts that worked. Maybe you've shipped a class assignment and then found yourself more interested in what it was promising to everything around it — where it would fail, who would notice, what depended on it.

Good infrastructure is like good plumbing. It works quietly, fails loudly. Come tell us about what you’ve built, and what you’ve learned along the way.

Applicants must be based in the United States.