Department: Engineering

Reports To: CTO

Experience Level: Senior (5+ years)

About the Role

We are a fast-growing, high-impact software startup building products that serve customers with strict compliance requirements. Our infrastructure has grown into a multi-cloud environment spanning AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS), Fly.io and GCP, and we need a senior engineer who can own this landscape end-to-end. This is a high-autonomy role where you will be the primary technical authority on infrastructure, platform reliability, and systems-level engineering. In this role you will be the one engineer our developers turn to when they need deep expertise in cloud architecture, systems design, and backend performance.

What You’ll Own

Cloud Infrastructure & Architecture

• Design, implement, and maintain our multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS and Kubernetes, including EKS clusters, ECS services, Lambda functions, and RDS databases. • Define and enforce infrastructure-as-code practices using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi. Ensure all infrastructure changes are version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and reproducible. • Architect networking, security groups, IAM policies, and service mesh configurations for production workloads. • Evaluate cloud spend and implement cost optimization strategies without sacrificing reliability or security.

Compliance & Security

• Own the technical implementation of SOC 2 controls and maintain continuous compliance across our infrastructure. Serve as the engineering point of contact during audits. • Implement and maintain GDPR-compliant data handling practices at the infrastructure level, including data residency, encryption at rest and in transit, access logging, and data retention policies. • Manage secrets, certificates, and key rotation. Harden systems against common attack vectors and conduct periodic security reviews. • Develop and maintain runbooks and incident response procedures for security events.

Platform Reliability & Observability

• Build and maintain observability infrastructure: distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics dashboards, and alerting pipelines using tools such as OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana. • Define and track SLOs/SLIs for critical services. Lead incident response, conduct blameless postmortems, and drive reliability improvements. • Design and implement CI/CD pipelines that give developers fast, reliable feedback loops from commit to production.

Systems & Backend Engineering

• Provide deep systems-level expertise to the development team: performance profiling, memory management, concurrency, networking, and debugging complex production issues. • Contribute to backend services and infrastructure tooling where needed. You may not own application features, but you’ll be the person who makes them run well. • Mentor developers on infrastructure best practices, container optimization, and writing services that are observable and operationally sound.

What We’re Looking For

Required Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure in production environments, with strong depth in AWS (EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch). • Experience running Kubernetes in production: cluster management, networking (CNI, ingress, service mesh), RBAC, resource management, and troubleshooting. • Direct experience implementing and maintaining SOC 2 compliance controls in a software environment. Familiarity with GDPR or other data privacy regulations is strongly preferred. • Strong infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform preferred) with experience in CI/CD pipeline design and GitOps workflows. • Solid systems engineering fundamentals: Linux administration, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS), shell scripting, and comfort working at the OS level. • Experience building observability stacks and using data to drive reliability decisions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience as a sole or primary infrastructure engineer at a small company, comfortable operating with high autonomy and broad scope. • Backend development experience in one or more of: Go, Python, TypeScript/Node.js. • Experience with database administration (PostgreSQL preferred), including performance tuning, replication, and backup strategies. • Familiarity with vector databases, RAG architectures, or AI/ML infrastructure is a plus given our product direction. • Security certifications (AWS Security Specialty, CKS) or compliance experience beyond SOC 2.

Working Here

We are a small company where individual contributors have outsized impact. You will work directly with the CTO and development team, with significant influence over our technical direction. We value engineers who communicate clearly, think in systems, and take ownership of outcomes rather than tasks. This role offers the opportunity to shape a growing infrastructure from the ground up, with the autonomy and trust that comes from being the expert in the room.