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: 

$190,000 - $200,000, DOE + Benefits

Who we are:

inKind connects passionate diners with exceptional restaurants across the country. inKind partners with thousands of restaurants and has millions of users who want to discover great places, dine confidently, and earn meaningful rewards.

Through the inKind app, guests earn 20% back every time they dine, turning everyday meals into something more rewarding. From celebrated restaurant groups like José Andres and Michael Mina to beloved neighborhood favorites, inKind helps diners explore the best restaurants in town while supporting the restaurants and chefs who shape how their cities eat.

Rooted in hospitality and built on a win-win philosophy, inKind exists to help great restaurants thrive while inspiring guests to dine out more often. Every meal creates value on both sides of the table, empowering diners to savor more while strengthening the restaurant community.

inKind is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that diversity is vital to inKind's ability to provide our clients with the best recommendations and are committed to fostering a varied and inclusive work environment. Your race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability status, veteran status, or any other protected category have no bearing on our hiring decisions.

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