Staff/Principal Platform Engineer — Kape Partner Portal

Employment Type: Full Time Location: Germany

We're looking for a Staff/Principal Platform Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the Kape Partner Portal — our B2B platform that lets partners license our services and integrate our SDKs into their own products. This is a high-ownership, cross-stack role: you'll shape architecture end-to-end across backend and frontend, while leading AI-assisted engineering at scale.

You'll own the technical direction of a multi-tenant platform covering partner onboarding, entitlements, SDK licensing, configuration management, and operational visibility. The role suits someone who thinks in systems, communicates clearly with both engineers and business stakeholders, and is excited about driving AI-orchestrated engineering workflows rather than maintaining legacy patterns.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end architecture of the Kape Partner Portal — backend services in Rust, the Next.js frontend, and everything in between
• Design and evolve the multi-tenant control plane
• Lead AI-assisted development with Claude Code — designing prompts and workflows, orchestrating sub-agents, reviewing and validating generated output, and shaping how the team uses AI to ship faster without sacrificing quality
• Make pragmatic technology choices across the full stack (Rust, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis) and across infrastructure (AWS, ideally with Terraform/Scalr)
• Define and own observability, reliability, and security standards (Prometheus, Grafana, structured logging, alerting)
• Design clean, well-documented REST APIs for internal services and partner integrations
• Partner closely with product, business, and customer-facing teams — including running technical sessions and presentations directly with enterprise customers
• Establish and uphold high engineering standards through code reviews, testing practices, and clear documentation

What You'll Bring

• Proven experience architecting scalable, multi-tenant B2B systems end-to-end, ideally in a SaaS context where you've bridged engineering and business needs
• Comfort working across the full stack — backend, frontend, databases, caching — with a clear mental model of how the pieces fit together. We use Rust (backend) and Next.js (frontend), but transferable cross-stack experience is what matters most
• A modern view on AI-assisted engineering. Experience orchestrating, guiding, and supervising AI agents (Claude Code or similar) to deliver production-grade systems is more important to us than years of hands-on Rust experience. The ability to direct AI well is the leverage point of this role
• Strong system design fundamentals: distributed systems, concurrency, performance trade-offs, reliability
• Solid understanding of REST API design, database modeling, and caching strategies
• Excellent communication skills — equally comfortable in deep technical reviews and in front of enterprise customers
• High degree of ownership and the ability to operate independently with minimal direction

Nice to Have

• Experience with Terraform / Scalr in an AWS environment
• Hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana
• Background in identity, authentication, secure networking, or VPN platforms
• Experience designing or shipping SDKs and cross-platform libraries

What We Offer

• Work with a modern tech stack in a strong engineering culture
• Influence on technical decisions and room to innovate
• Continuous learning opportunities and support for professional development
• A motivated, collaborative team with flat hierarchies
• A strategic role with real technical influence and ownership
• A modern engineering culture with CI/CD, observability, and a strong code review culture
• Purpose-driven work: we value security, quality, and depth over quick hacks

How We'll Support You

We believe in fostering an environment that empowers decision-making at all levels. Our culture is rooted in the inverted pyramid approach, where the engineers — who have a deep understanding of the product and the customers — are the ones who have the knowledge and the authority to make impactful decisions.

• We prioritize treating every team member with respect and promote open and constructive feedback, ensuring a culture of trust and transparency
• We encourage learning through experimentation and provide a safe space for everyone to learn from their experiences
• Our managers are dedicated to facilitating career growth and creating an environment that attracts and supports talented engineers

ExpressVPN, a Kape Technologies company, is an equal opportunity employer. We promote equal recruitment and employment opportunities, and do not discriminate based on gender identity and/or expression, age, race, color, disability, culture, religion or belief, family and/or marital status, sexual orientation, or other characteristics protected by applicable law. We celebrate a diverse and inclusive work environment in which applicants and employees are treated with respect and dignity, and excel based on personal merit, qualifications, experience, and performance.

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