Staff Platform Network Engineer
As a Staff Platform Network Engineer, you will design, build, and mature the service connectivity platform that underpins how FanDuel services communicate with each other and the outside world. Your focus will be delivering secure, scalable, and reliable connectivity across our hybrid cloud environment through service mesh, ingress, gateway APIs, TLS, and edge-routing capabilities that enable teams to move quickly and safely. This role lands at a pivotal moment in our platform evolution. We're rolling out Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh (with Impart) across our EKS estate and evolving toward a standardized, self-service connectivity platform. You'll help shape the long-term architecture, operating model, and migration strategy away from legacy ingress patterns, while ensuring the platform remains reliable, secure, and sustainable at scale. This is a hands-on builder-operator role. You'll partner closely with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable connectivity capabilities, serve as a subject matter expert in service mesh and traffic management, and help teams adopt reliable patterns for service-to-service communication. By connecting platform behavior to real user impact, you'll drive improvements in reliability, performance, security, and operational maturity across the organisation.
- Defining and driving the service connectivity strategy and roadmap across multiple teams, aligning with business priorities, regulatory requirements, and engineering goals.
- Maturing our Kong Gateway and Kong Mesh rollout into a production-grade platform across our EKS estate, including mTLS enforcement, traffic policy standardization, self-service onboarding, and migration from legacy ingress patterns.
- Designing and evolving scalable connectivity capabilities spanning service mesh, ingress, gateways, TLS and certificate automation, DNS, and L7 edge routing across hybrid AWS environments, including AWS Outposts.
- Establishing best practices for service-to-service communication, zero-trust networking, traffic management, and certificate lifecycle management across the organisation.
- Building infrastructure-as-code, tooling, automation, and platform guardrails that improve reliability, reduce operational toil, and enable safe self-service adoption.
- Leading cross-team initiatives to improve connectivity reliability, reduce systemic operational risk, and drive platform-level resilience improvements.
- Leveraging automation and AI-assisted workflows to accelerate root cause analysis and improve operational efficiency at scale.
- Leading complex production incident response across Kubernetes networking, ingress, DNS, load balancing, service mesh, and cloud edge infrastructure.
- Stewarding connectivity platforms operating under strict regulatory and compliance requirements, ensuring secure operation, auditability, and disciplined change management.
- Partnering with engineering and product leadership to influence platform direction, roadmap priorities, and long-term connectivity strategy.
- Evaluating build-versus-buy decisions and vendor capabilities against platform requirements and operational sustainability goals.
- Mentoring engineers and raising the connectivity and platform networking maturity across the organisation.
- Significant hands-on experience in platform engineering, SRE, cloud infrastructure, or related fields, with a track record of driving impact across multiple teams or domains (required).
- Strong expertise in modern service mesh technologies (e.g. Istio, Kong Mesh, Linkerd, or Envoy-based platforms), including mTLS enforcement, traffic policy design, and service-to-service security patterns (required).
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes networking and service connectivity, including CNIs, ingress controllers, gateway APIs, and operating distributed systems at scale across hybrid AWS environments (required).
- Working knowledge of AWS networking primitives such as VPCs, Route 53, PrivateLink, ALB/NLB, and CloudFront, with the ability to reason end-to-end across L3 through L7 networking layers (required).
- Experience defining and driving platform, reliability, or connectivity strategy across teams, with the ability to influence technical direction and engineering standards (required).
- Strong understanding of distributed systems principles and the real-world trade-offs involved in highly available service-to-service communication (required).
- Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategies for connectivity infrastructure using user-centric and business-aligned metrics (required).
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript), and experience building scalable tooling, automation, and platform capabilities (required).
- Experience implementing zero-trust networking principles, including workload identity and mutual TLS at scale (required).
- Experience driving large-scale operational improvements through automation, reducing organizational toil, and eliminating recurring classes of issues (required).
- Strong analytical and communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders and translate technical constraints into business and customer impact (required).
- A mindset of ownership, continuous improvement, and long-term platform sustainability (required).
- Hands-on experience with Kong Gateway and/or Kong Mesh (nice-to-have).
- Familiarity with eBPF-based networking technologies such as Cilium and their implications for performance and observability at scale (nice-to-have).
- CNCF Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKS, or CKAD) (nice-to-have).
- Experience operating in regulated industries where network segmentation, auditability, and security controls are critical (nice-to-have).
- Medical, vision, and dental insurance.
- Life insurance.
- Disability insurance.
- A 401(k) matching program (up to 5%).
- Paid personal time off.
- 14 paid company holidays.
- Paid sick time.
- Short-term or long-term incentive compensation, including cash bonuses and stock program participation.
- Commuter benefits.
- Pet insurance.
FanDuel Group is an innovative sports-tech entertainment company that is changing the way consumers engage with their favorite sports, teams, and leagues. The premier gaming destination in the North America, FanDuel Group consists of a portfolio of leading brands across gaming, sports betting, daily fantasy sports, advance-deposit wagering, and TV/media, including FanDuel, Stardust Casino and TVG. The company is based in New York with US offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Jersey City, as well as global offices in Canada and Scotland. The company’s affiliates have offices worldwide, including in Ireland, Portugal, Romania, and Australia. FanDuel Group is a subsidiary of Flutter Entertainment, the world's largest sports betting and gaming operator with a portfolio of globally recognized brands and traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: FLUT).