Senior Platform Engineer

Leafcloud is a sovereign cloud provider based in the Netherlands. We run real European infrastructure on open standards — OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes (Gardener) — for customers who care where their data lives and how their compute is powered. 

We are also unusual in how we run our infrastructure. Our Leaf Sites are distributed compute installations placed inside buildings that need heat: data centres that warm offices, hotels, and apartments instead of sending hot air into the sky. The result is genuinely lower-carbon cloud — not a marketing claim, an architectural choice. 

We’re a small team in a serious moment. We’re rebuilding our second OpenStack core, adding Leaf Sites, launching managed databases, and laying the groundwork for sovereign AI inference. There’s real ownership available to people who want to shape what European cloud looks like. 

About the role 

We’re building Leafcloud’s customer-facing platform layer — managed Kubernetes (Gardener), managed databases (CloudNativePG), and the customer portal that ties it all together. This role is the senior engineering anchor for that work. 

You’ll partner directly with the CTO on technical direction, and pair with a second platform engineer on delivery. There is no Platform Lead above you. The platform layer is your domain to shape, alongside the CTO, with real authority on architectural decisions. 

The first hundred days are about shipping DBaaS — internal beta, external beta with design partners, then GA — while standing up the customer-facing Gardener experience. After that, the customer portal direction lands and the work expands accordingly. 

What you’ll do 

• Architect and deliver our managed database product on top of CloudNativePG and others 

• Shape the customer-facing Kubernetes experience (Gardener Shoots, lifecycle, onboarding, SLA) 

• Drive customer portal direction (Skyline, Exosphere, or something custom — open conversation) 

• Make the calls on operator patterns, API design, and lifecycle automation 

• Pair with a second platform engineer on delivery; review their work; help them grow 

• Eventually: contribute to other managed services on our roadmap 

Required: - 5+ years operating Kubernetes in production - You’ve built or operated a custom controller or operator at meaningful scale - Strong Go and/or TypeScript; comfortable across the stack - You’ve shipped a multi-tenant SaaS or platform product end-to-end, including its customer-facing UX - Design literacy — you can evaluate UX options and give meaningful feedback on customer-facing flows, even if you’re not writing React yourself - One concrete CNCF or Kubernetes-ecosystem contribution we can look at: an issue, a PR, a blog post, a talk 

Strongly preferred: - Gardener specifically - CloudNativePG or another operator-pattern database - OpenStack as a substrate (you don’t need to be an OpenStack engineer; understanding it as the layer below helps) - Customer-facing platform background, not just internal platform - Hands-on React 

Not required: - OpenStack engineering, bare-metal, Ceph, or network depth — that sits with our SRE team