Head of Platform & Cloud Engineering

Team:
Platform & Cloud Engineering

Manages: SRE team

Location:

Greater Boston or NYC Area - Hybrid: 3 days per week in the Quincy or NYC office

About Rapid Ratings

Rapid Ratings is a financial technology company on a mission to make the global economy more transparent and resilient. We provide quantitative financial health intelligence that helps enterprises understand the true condition of their suppliers and business partners, enabling smarter risk decisions across complex, global supply chains.

We are hiring a deeply technical senior leader to own the cloud platform, resilience, security posture, and AI infrastructure powering Rapid Ratings’ products. The role blends deep systems engineering with modern SRE practice, bridging low-level cloud architecture, high-scale distributed systems, and platform engineering. As AI and developer self-service absorb routine pipeline toil, you will raise the technical bar for operational excellence, lead our SRE team, and build the paved-road infrastructure our AI systems, agents, and product squads run on.

• AWS architecture & distributed systems. Architect high-availability, multi-region AWS infrastructure optimized for scale, latency, resilience, and structural reliability.
• Reliability & operational excellence. Lead the SRE function to establish robust telemetry, SLO frameworks, and rigorous root-cause analysis through blameless post-incident reviews. Drive self-healing automation that minimises operational overhead and mean-time-to-recovery.
• AI infrastructure. Build and operate the model-serving layer, routing pipelines, cost attribution, and governance frameworks for our AI agents, copilots, and Platform Model Context Protocols (MCPs).
• Security & compliance posture. Own the platform’s threat detection and defense. Embed SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls directly into infrastructure code and automated guardrails.
• Paved-road platform & Fin Ops. Design self-service infrastructure patterns so engineering squads ship securely and without friction, while continuously driving cloud cost optimization.

What This Role Is Not

This is not pipeline maintenance. Product developers own their own build, test, and deployment workflows, using AI tooling on top of the paved road you provide. You build the foundational platform and guardrails, not application-level scripts. We’re hiring for the leverage, not the toil.

• Kubernetes at the core. Deep, hands-on experience running production Kubernetes (EKS) at scale — this is the backbone of our platform, not an add-on.
• AWS mastery. Deep, hands-on experience across the native AWS stack (EKS/ECS, IAM, VPC networking, Cloud Front, Lambda, RDS/DynamoDB) and infrastructure as code (Terraform / Open Tofu).
• Systems engineering. Strong foundation in Linux internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, routing), performance tuning, and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Security & compliance. Direct experience implementing and maintaining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 technical controls within cloud-native environments.
• Software development. Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for building platform tooling, custom telemetry, and automated remediation.
• AI/LLM operations. Hands‑on exposure to model-hosting patterns, vector databases, API gateways, and LLM orchestration infrastructure.
• Leadership & mentorship. Track record of managing distributed SRE/infrastructure teams, including international squads, while remaining directly involved in architectural design.

• A natural problem solver who stays curious, works logically, and digs past symptoms to root cause.
• You treat AI as a strong collaborator, building the platforms and guardrails that lift the whole engineering group rather than only your own output.
• You set technical direction and carry others with you through standards, design review, documentation, and mentoring.
• You communicate clearly across every tier, from technical specialists to the executive group, with meticulous attention to detail.
• You bring a calm, positive attitude under pressure, including during production incidents and against tight deadlines.

• Balance: roughly 50%…