Senior Platform Engineer

Job Title: Senior Platform Engineer

Reports to: Director of Engineering

About the role: 

The Senior Platform Engineer at inKind is responsible for owning, evolving, and operating our cloud infrastructure as the foundation of a growing financial and hospitality technology platform. This role exists to ensure that our systems are secure, reliable, observable, and capable of scaling as both traffic and organizational complexity increase.

This is a deeply technical, hands-on role with real ownership. You will design, implement, and operate our AWS infrastructure; make forward-looking decisions about how our platform should evolve; and carry those decisions through implementation, migration, and steady-state operation. When the platform changes—new AWS services, runtime upgrades, architecture shifts—you are ahead of it, not reacting to it.

You’ll work closely with application engineers, but your focus is the platform itself: compute, networking, data stores, deployment workflows, observability, and operational correctness. In a small but growing team, this role sets the standard for how infrastructure is designed, changed, and trusted.

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

Some Of Our Benefits: 

• Generous PTO and company holiday policy + company paid Short Term Disability
• 100% employer covered health and dental insurance for our direct employees (a set plan is covered, with higher tier healthcare coverage available at employee’s additional cost; dependent coverage is at employee’s cost); vision plan available at employee’s additional cost
• Child Care Benefits and generous parental leave

Salary: 

• $190,000 - $200,000, DOE + Benefits