Staff Platform Engineer

2k · Austin, Texas, United States

Who We Are At 2K, we create some of the most iconic and culture-shaping video games in entertainment, including NBA® 2K, one of the top-selling franchises in the world, and legendary titles like BioShock®, Borderlands®, Mafia, Sid Meier’s Civilization®, and XCOM®, as well as fan favorites WWE® 2K, TopSpin®, and PGA TOUR® 2K. We build unforgettable experiences by pushing the boundaries of creativity, authenticity and innovation across every genre. Our portfolio is brought to life by some of the most influential game development studios in the world. Visual Concepts, Firaxis Games, Hangar 13, Cat Daddy Games, 31st Union, Cloud Chamber, Gearbox, HB Studios, and 2K SportsLab create world-class experiences across platforms. But what truly powers 2K is our people. We believe the best ideas come from teams that feel empowered, supported, and inspired. As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive workplace where people are encouraged to come as they are and do their best work. What We Need As a Staff Platform Engineer at 2K, you are a visionary technical leader serving as the architect and champion of our internal developer ecosystems. Your primary mission is to steer the integration of advanced AI capabilities into our core infrastructure, driving the design and evolution of our next-generation Autonomous Agentic Development Platform (ADP). By championing a strict "platform-as-a-product" philosophy, you will ensure our ecosystem is continuously optimized for internal game and back-end service teams. Through the creation of robust "golden paths," self-service infrastructure, and sophisticated automation, you will unlock developer velocity and eliminate operational friction. Operating with organization-wide influence, you will shape the long-term roadmap for platform engineering and mentor senior technical talent across 2K. What You’ll Do <ul data-path-to-node="10"> <li> AI Strategy & Execution: Own the strategic roadmap and oversee the architectural delivery of our developer portal, utilizing AI and LLM-backed agentic workflows to automate complex environment bootstrapping, context-aware troubleshooting, and intent-driven infrastructure provisioning. </li> <li> Technical Leadership: Accountable for driving the technical strategic roadmap within Platform Engineering. Serve as the primary architectural advisor to engineering tech leads, consulting on core design strategies to ensure their services are built to leverage cloud-native Kubernetes patterns and advanced AI platform features effectively. </li> <li> Platform Product Ownership: Drive a "platform as a product" strategy, positioning the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) as the central hub of the developer experience. Partner with engineering leaders to deliver intuitive, frictionless, self-service capabilities that abstract away underlying infrastructure complexities and accelerate software delivery. </li> <li> DevEx Strategy: Collaborate with tech leads across different studios to identify systemic bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle, advising and steering teams on the design of automated solutions that elevate developer velocity, autonomy, and overall experience. </li> <li> Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Provide high-level architectural direction and governance to internal tech leads as they build and maintain modular, reusable Terraform libraries, ensuring standardized environment provisioning across multi-cloud and on-prem data centers. </li> <li> Governance & Standards: Define organization-wide standards for container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and service discovery within the Kubernetes ecosystem, partnering with engineering leads to ensure adoption and operational consistency. </li> <li> Advanced Troubleshooting: Provide Tier 2 support for complex platform-level issues, conducting deep-dive root cause analysis and implementing architectural changes to prevent systemic recurrence. </li> <li> Operational Resilience & On-Call Strategy: Establish and iterate on the incident management and escalation strategy. In this role, you will partner with engineering leads to define operational guardrails, SLA/SLO frameworks, and blameless post-mortem processes to ensure continuous platform availability and high operational maturity. </li> </ul> What Will Make You A Great Fit <ul data-path-to-node="13"> <li> Deep Industry Experience: 10+ years of experience in Infrastructure, DevOps, or Platform Engineering, with at least 4+ years specifically focused on building internal developer platforms or Kubernetes-based tooling. </li> <li> Kubernetes Expertise: Expert-level mastery of Kubernetes architecture, cloud-native ecosystems, and internals such as operators, controllers, and CRDs. </li> <li> Cloud Architecture: Deep, expert-level experience with AWS and/or GCP, specifically managing highly elastic, mission-critical production workloads. </li> <li> AI & Agentic Engineering Skills: Proven foundational knowledge or hands-on experience incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI agents into automated engineering workflows, APIs, or platform tools. </li> <li> Strong Programming Foundations: Advanced proficiency in Go, Python, Java, or Rust, with a clear focus on building automation tools, Kubernetes operators, and developer-facing APIs. </li> <li> Modern Tooling Mastery: Complete mastery of Git, configuration management tools, and CI/CD platforms (such as GitHub Actions and ArgoCD) alongside expert-level Terraform utilization. </li> <li> High-Availability by Design: Proven ability to architect multi-region, high-availability systems capable of supporting global user bases. </li> <li> Customer-First Mindset: A strong "customer-first" behavioral mindset tailored to internal developer needs, combined with the ability to influence without authority across distributed teams and time zones. </li> <li> Rotational Availability: Willingness and ability to participate in a 24/7 rotational on-call schedule to maintain platform stability. </li> </ul> Bonus Items <ul data-path-to-node="15"> <li> Gaming Industry Background: Prior experience in the gaming industry, specifically supporting large-scale, high-concurrency multiplayer backend services for AAA games. </li> <li> Agentic Workflows: Experience successfully driving an engineering organization through progressive maturity levels of agentic workflows (e.g., shifting from human-in-the-loop to autonomous hybrid operations). </li> </ul> As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to ensuring that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform their essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us if you need reasonable accommodation. Please note that 2K Games and its studios never uses instant messaging apps or personal email accounts to contact prospective employees or conduct interviews and when emailing, only use 2K.com accounts. Please note that 2K Publishing is unable to provide visa sponsorship or assistance for this position. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without requiring current or future employer sponsorship. #LI-Hybrid