Senior Platform Engineer

About the Role

You'll be one of our first platform engineers building the foundation for our fintech engineering organization as we scale from startup to enterprise-grade operations.

This is not a "keep the lights on" operations role. You'll build internal products - self-service tools and automated workflows that make secure, compliant infrastructure invisible to product teams. Your customers are engineers; your metrics are their velocity and our security posture.

• Design self-service infrastructure using AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM) and Pulumi/Type Script

• Create automation that eliminates manual work

• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for fast, safe deployments

• Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability systems

• Build documentation and runbooks that empower teams to self-serve

• Work with product teams to understand friction points

• Balance fintech compliance requirements with developer experience

• Participate in incident response and postmortems

• Optimize system performance, scalability, and cost

• Implement security controls that satisfy regulatory requirements

• Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements

• Partner with engineers and stakeholders to set technical strategy

• Explain technical decisions clearly to non-technical audiences

• 5+ years infrastructure, platform, or Dev Ops engineering

• Production AWS (EC2, ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM)

• Infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi or Terraform - we use Pulumi/Type Script)

• CI/CD pipelines (Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, Jenkins, or similar)

• Containers (Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes)

• Monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Cloud Watch, or similar)

• Strong coding skills in Ruby, Python, Go, Type Script, or similar

• Track record building platforms that teams actually adopted

• Fintech or regulated industry experience (SOC 2, PCI-DSS)

• Security automation or compliance tooling

• 0→1 infrastructure building experience

• Data and ML infrastructure or MLOps background

During interviews, we'll discuss your focus area. All roles are 70% specialty, 30% general platform work.

Security & Compliance:
Secure architectures, IAM systems, security automation, SOC 2/PCI-DSS frameworks, audit preparation

Site Reliability:
Observability platforms, intelligent alerting, SLOs/error budgets, disaster recovery, performance optimization

Developer

Experience:

Self-service provisioning, CI/CD optimization, internal platforms, reusable infrastructure patterns

At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth Fin Tech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most.

Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.

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.

US salary range for this full-time position consists of base + equity + benefits

Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Kikoff covers the full cost of health insurance for the employee!

Visa sponsorship available:
Kikoff is willing to provide sponsorship for H1-B visas and U.S. green cards for exceptional talent.

Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age,…