Senior Platform Engineer

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><strong>Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale</strong><br>Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.<br>We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Why Kikoff:</strong></p> <p>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.</p></div><h2 data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><strong>About the Role</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p> </p> <h2><strong>In This Role, You Will</strong></h2> <p>Build & Automate</p> <ul> <li> <p>Design self-service infrastructure using AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM) and Pulumi/TypeScript</p> </li> <li> <p>Create automation that eliminates manual work</p> </li> <li> <p>Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for fast, safe deployments</p> </li> </ul> <p>Enable & Scale</p> <ul> <li> <p>Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability systems</p> </li> <li> <p>Build documentation and runbooks that empower teams to self-serve</p> </li> <li> <p>Work with product teams to understand friction points</p> </li> </ul> <p>Improve & Secure</p> <ul> <li> <p>Balance fintech compliance requirements with developer experience</p> </li> <li> <p>Participate in incident response and postmortems</p> </li> <li> <p>Optimize system performance, scalability, and cost</p> </li> <li> <p>Implement security controls that satisfy regulatory requirements</p> </li> </ul> <p>Collaborate</p> <ul> <li> <p>Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements</p> </li> <li> <p>Partner with engineers and stakeholders to set technical strategy</p> </li> <li> <p>Explain technical decisions clearly to non-technical audiences</p> </li> </ul> <p> </p> <h2><strong>Qualifications</strong></h2> <ul> <li> <p>5+ years infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineering</p> </li> <li> <p>Production AWS (EC2, ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM)</p> </li> <li> <p>Infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi or Terraform- we use Pulumi/TypeScript)</p> </li> <li> <p>CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)</p> </li> <li> <p>Containers (Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes)</p> </li> <li> <p>Monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, CloudWatch, or similar)</p> </li> <li> <p>Strong coding skills in Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar</p> </li> <li> <p>Track record building platforms that teams actually adopted</p> </li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus points for:</strong></p> <ul> <li> <p>Fintech or regulated industry experience (SOC 2, PCI-DSS)</p> </li> <li> <p>Security automation or compliance tooling</p> </li> <li> <p>0→1 infrastructure building experience</p> </li> <li> <p>Data and ML infrastructure or MLOps background</p> </li> </ul> <p> </p> <h2><strong>Specialization Areas</strong></h2> <p>During interviews, we'll discuss your focus area. All roles are 70% specialty, 30% general platform work.</p> <p>Security & Compliance: Secure architectures, IAM systems, security automation, SOC 2/PCI-DSS frameworks, audit preparation</p> <p>Site Reliability: Observability platforms, intelligent alerting, SLOs/error budgets, disaster recovery, performance optimization</p> <p>Developer Experience: Self-service provisioning, CI/CD optimization, internal platforms, reusable infrastructure patterns</p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="title">Base Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$244,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$292,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><p><u>Equal Employment Opportunity Statement</u></p> <p>Kikoff Inc. is an…