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: 

• $190000 - $200000 DOE + Benefits

What We Do

inKind's mission is to support the success of independent restaurants and hospitality groups by providing funding and enriching customers' dining experiences with the inKind platform. At inKind we believe restaurants are integral parts of our communities and recognize the economic realities of being a successful operator. To better support hospitality ventures we created a unique funding model that focuses on ensuring the success of our partners and providing customers a way to discover new restaurants nationwide.

Why Work With Us

We are a team of passionate foodies focused on creating a lasting impact for the restaurant industry. Our team celebrates diversity encourages collaboration and shares meals to imagine the most innovative and modern solutions for the food & beverage landscape. If you feel inspired by our vision we’d love to hear what we could put on your plate.

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