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.
In This Role, You Will
Build & Automate
Design self-service infrastructure using AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM) and Pulumi/TypeScript
Create automation that eliminates manual work
Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for fast, safe deployments
Enable & Scale
Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability systems
Build documentation and runbooks that empower teams to self-serve
Work with product teams to understand friction points
Improve & Secure
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
Collaborate
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
Qualifications
5+ years infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineering
Production AWS (EC2, ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM)
Infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi or Terraform- we use Pulumi/TypeScript)
CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)
Containers (Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes)
Monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, CloudWatch, or similar)
Strong coding skills in Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar
Track record building platforms that teams actually adopted
Bonus points for:
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
Specialization Areas
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
Kikoff: A FinTech Unicorn Powering Financial Progress with AI
At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech 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.
Why Kikoff:
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.
🏥 Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Kikoff covers the full cost of health insurance for the employee!
📈 Meaningful equity in the form of RSU's
🏝️ 20 days of paid time off per year — we encourage taking real time away to recharge and do your best work
💵 401(k) plan with a meaningful employer match to help you invest in your future
💰 Competitive pay based on experience consisting of base + equity + benefits
Location: Hybrid, 3 days onsite in San Francisco, CA.
Visa sponsorship available: Kikoff is willing to provide sponsorship for H1-B visas and U.S. green cards for exceptional talent.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
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, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
Please reference the following for more information.