Senior Platform Engineer

Who you are

Infrastructure Owner: You take responsibility for systems in production and feel accountable for their behavior over time
Systems Thinker: You understand how compute, storage, networking, and application behavior interact under real load
Pragmatic Operator: You know when to modernize, when to migrate, and when stability matters more than novelty
Infrastructure Decision-Maker: You can evaluate tradeoffs (EKS vs ECS, Redis vs Valkey, EC2 vs Fargate) and carry those decisions through safely
Operationally Grounded: You’ve run systems in production, handled incidents, and learned from failures
Security-Aware: You design infrastructure with least privilege, network isolation, and secure defaults
Clear Communicator: You explain infrastructure decisions and risk in a way engineers and leadership can understand

Role Responsibilities

Platform & Cloud Infrastructure

Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, and managed services
Design and maintain infrastructure that supports high availability, predictable performance, and financial correctness
Lead platform-level architectural decisions, including service migrations and runtime changes (e.g., Redis → Valkey, EKS → ECS/Fargate)
Ensure infrastructure choices align with reliability, cost, and operational simplicity—not just trend adoption

Deployment, Reliability & Operations

Design and maintain deployment pipelines that are safe, repeatable, and observable
Own system reliability through capacity planning, failure modeling, and controlled change management
Lead incident response and root-cause analysis for infrastructure-level failures
Participate in on-call rotations and continuously improve operational ergonomics

Observability, Security & Governance

Build and maintain strong observability across infrastructure and services (metrics, logs, tracing, alerting)
Ensure secure configuration of AWS resources, IAM policies, secrets management, and network boundaries
Proactively identify infrastructure risks related to scale, cost, or security and address them before they become incidents

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

Partner closely with application engineers to ensure platform constraints and capabilities are well understood
Drive infrastructure changes through hands-on implementation
Establish standards and best practices for infrastructure, deployment, and operations as the team grows
Mentor other platform engineers and help raise the overall operational maturity of the organization

Minimum Qualifications

8+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure in cloud environments
Deep experience with AWS core services (EC2, ECS/EKS, VPC, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, ALB/NLB, CloudWatch, etc.)
Strong understanding of containerized workloads and orchestration tradeoffs
Proven experience designing systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and controlled failure
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent)
Demonstrated ability to plan and execute infrastructure migrations safely
Experience debugging real production incidents involving networking, scaling, or service degradation

Preferred Qualification

Experience operating infrastructure for financial systems or other high-reliability domains
Firsthand experience scaling infrastructure through periods of rapid growth
Strong opinions about observability and operational hygiene, informed by past failures
Experience simplifying, retiring, or rearchitecting over-engineered infrastructure
Comfort working closely with a Rails-based application stack while remaining tool-agnostic