Staff Infrastructure Engineer

• This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products
• We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact
• Kikoff’s infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering teams to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline
• The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure
• As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own high-leverage infrastructure problems from design through production operation and help run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers
• You will build internal products and paved paths that turn ambiguous problems into durable systems
• Your work should improve delivery speed and reliability, reduce cost, and reduce the amount of operational work product teams carry
• This is a hands-on Staff IC role. You will foster relationships, write code, review designs, make architecture decisions, lead through incidents, and help engineers solve problems outside the runbook
• You will have a primary area of depth and enough range to follow production problems across infrastructure boundaries
• AI is increasing the amount of code and change moving through our systems. You will help build a platform that can absorb that growth without creating more incidents, unsustainable cost, or a team that depends on heroics
• Design and implement self-service infrastructure on AWS using reusable code and infrastructure-as-code patterns. We use Pulumi, HCL, and TypeScript heavily. The company runs on Ruby
• Own the systems you build in production, including reliability, security, capacity, cost, upgrades, incidents, and recovery
• Give critical services an SLO, actionable alerts, a useful dashboard, a runbook, and a tested recovery path
• Automate recurring operational work and eliminate failure-prone manual steps rather than allowing them to become permanent processes
• Work directly with engineers to turn recurring friction into paved paths, self-service tools, and automated workflows that are faster and safer than one-off solutions
• Measure outcomes for internal customers through adoption, developer feedback, delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load
• Use the fastest responsible path when a team is blocked, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability
• Set technical direction for ambiguous infrastructure work, then carry it from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and production ownership
• Make clear trade-offs among delivery speed, reliability, security, cost, and long-term operational complexity
• Partner across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Product Engineering to build security and compliance controls into normal engineering workflows
• Review code and designs, challenge weak assumptions, help other engineers make better technical decisions, and uphold high standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability
• Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and ensure the system is better after service is restored
• Create standards, reusable patterns, and durable documentation that improve how teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software

Benefits

• Health Benefits
• Flexible PTO Policy
• Kickoff Paid Holidays
• Office Lunch & Dinners
• Commuter Benefits
• Commuter Flexible Savings
• 401k Matching
• Fitness Benefit Policy

• Strong coding skills in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, or a similar language. You can build production software, not only configure tools
• Clear, direct communication. You can explain a technical decision, its evidence, and its tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners
• A track record of building platform capabilities that engineers adopted because they solved real problems and were easier to use than one-off alternatives
• Experienced generalist judgment. You have depth in at least one infrastructure domain and can learn quickly across adjacent ones
• Production experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and the security boundaries around them
• 7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of Staff-level technical impact
• Sustained ownership of a consequential production system. You have operated what you built, handled incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and improved the system afterward
• Humble. We know the company has benefited from timing, circumstance, and the right people showing up. We are grateful, and we do not take it for granted
• Risk-oriented. We make tradeoffs deliberately. A mature team knows the difference between a risk worth taking and one that is not
• Scrappy. We move quickly and build what we need. We do not cut corners when they matter, and we do not over-engineer when they do not
• Data-obsessed. We look at the data, understand the mechanics behind it, and use that evidence to make better decisions
• Deep experience in one or more of observability, developer productivity, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, or security
• Experience with Pulumi and TypeScript on AWS, including ECS or Fargate, k8s, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, and IAM
• Experience building and operating an early-stage platform through rapid growth in fintech or another regulated environment