# Platform Engineer
Location: Seattle, WA (Hybrid) · Employment Type: Full-time · Level: Mid-Senior
[Company] is a Series C fintech startup transforming how businesses manage their financial operations. We serve 3,000+ mid-market companies with our suite of payment processing, expense management, and financial automation tools.
Our engineering team of 120 people ships constantly—we average 180+ deployments per week across 85 microservices. Our Platform team exists because we believe developers shouldn't waste time on infrastructure toil. We build the Internal Developer Platform that makes our engineers more productive, and we treat it like a product—because our users are developers.
What makes our Platform team different:
- We measure success by developer adoption, not infrastructure uptime
- We run monthly developer surveys and act on feedback within weeks
- We've reduced deployment time from 45 minutes to 5 minutes
- We operate with a 95% self-service rate—no tickets for standard infrastructure
- We ship internal features as fast as our product teams ship external ones
We're hiring a Platform Engineer to join our 8-person Platform team. You'll report to the Director of Platform Engineering and work alongside platform engineers, SREs, and developer experience specialists.
This is product engineering for developers.
Your users are the 120 engineers at [Company]. Your success isn't measured by uptime alone—it's measured by whether developers choose to use what you build, whether they're more productive because of it, and whether they recommend your platform to their teammates. You're building a product, not managing infrastructure.
The challenge you'll tackle:
Our platform has strong foundations, but we're scaling fast. We need to level up our self-service capabilities, improve our developer portal, and build golden paths that make the right way the easy way. Developers should be able to go from idea to production without filing tickets or waiting for approvals.
- Increase self-service infrastructure adoption from 95% to 99%
- Reduce time-to-first-deployment for new hires from 3 days to 4 hours
- Build golden paths for common service patterns (API, worker, scheduled job)
- Improve platform NPS from +42 to +60 through better tooling and documentation
- Enable 50+ new microservices per quarter without growing platform headcount
- Design and build self-service infrastructure provisioning for databases, caches, queues, and environments
- Develop platform APIs and CLIs that abstract Kubernetes complexity into simple, developer-friendly interfaces
- Build and improve our Backstage-based developer portal—service catalog, templates, and documentation
- Create golden path templates that encode best practices for security, observability, and scalability
- Conduct developer interviews, analyze platform usage data, and iterate based on feedback
- Write documentation, tutorials, and runbooks that scale knowledge across the engineering org
- Implement GitOps workflows for infrastructure changes with proper guardrails and rollback capabilities
- Design multi-tenant isolation, resource quotas, and cost visibility for platform services
- Collaborate with Security to bake compliance and audit logging into platform defaults
- Participate in on-call rotation for platform services (1 week every 8 weeks)
- 4+ years of platform engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps experience
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes—operators, CRDs, multi-tenancy, networking, and troubleshooting production issues
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform—modules, state management, testing, and drift detection
- Experience designing APIs (REST or gRPC) that developers consume—you've built interfaces, not just backends
- Demonstrated developer empathy—you've gathered feedback, measured adoption, and iterated on developer tools
- Programming proficiency in Go or Python for building tooling, operators, and automation
- Experience with observability systems—Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, structured logging
- Comfort with on-call responsibilities and incident response
- Experience building or extending Backstage developer portals
- Familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
- Background with GitOps tools like ArgoCD or Flux
- Experience building Kubernetes operators or custom controllers
- Track record of improving measurable developer productivity metrics
- Contributions to open-source platform tooling (Crossplane, Backstage plugins, etc.)
- Fintech or regulated industry experience
- Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS) with custom operators
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Crossplane for Kubernetes-native provisioning
- Developer Portal: Backstage with custom plugins
- GitOps: ArgoCD for application and infrastructure deployments
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Buildkite for builds, ArgoCD for deployments
- Cloud: AWS (EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, S3)
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty
- Secrets: HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes integration
- Service Mesh: Istio for service-to-service communication
- Languages: Go (primary for platform tooling), Python, TypeScript
We believe in transparency about where we are and where we're going. Here's what we measure:
- Deployment time: Reduced from 45 minutes to 5 minutes (target: under 3 minutes)
- Self-service rate: 95% of infrastructure provisioned via platform (target: 99%)
- Time to first deployment (new hire): 3 days (target: 4 hours)
- Time to production (new service): 2 days (target: 2 hours with golden paths)
- Platform NPS: +42 from quarterly developer surveys (target: +60)
- Support tickets per week: 15 platform-related tickets (target: under 5)
- Golden path adoption: 60% of new services use templates (target: 90%)
- Developer hours saved per month: ~800 hours (target: 1,500+ hours)
Salary: $165,000 - $210,000 (based on experience)
Equity: 0.05% - 0.15% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)
Benefits:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee, 80% dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $4,000 annual learning budget for conferences, courses, and certifications
- $2,000 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- On-call compensation: $600/week when primary
- Flexible hybrid work (2-3 days in Seattle office)
- Monthly team events and quarterly off-sites
Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We use real problems from our platform roadmap.
- Step 1: Recruiter Screen (30 min) - We'll discuss your background and what you're looking for in a platform role.
- Step 2: Technical Screen (60 min) - Platform engineering experience, Kubernetes and IaC fundamentals.
- Step 3: Platform Design (60 min) - Design a self-service feature for a real developer problem.
- Step 4: Developer Experience (45 min) - How you gather feedback, measure adoption, and iterate on tools.
- Step 5: Coding Session (60 min) - Build platform tooling like a Kubernetes operator or CLI tool.
- Step 6: Team & Culture (45 min) - Meet platform team members and actual platform users.
You'll receive feedback within 48 hours of each stage. No LeetCode puzzles or gotcha questions.
[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We believe the best platforms are built by diverse teams who bring different perspectives on how developers work. We're committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work.
We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
If you need accommodations during the interview process, let us know and we'll make it work.
---
*Ready to build the platform that makes 120 engineers more productive? Apply now.*
# Platform Engineer
**Location:** Seattle, WA (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Mid-Senior
## About [Company]
[Company] is a Series C fintech startup transforming how businesses manage their financial operations. We serve 3,000+ mid-market companies with our suite of payment processing, expense management, and financial automation tools.
Our engineering team of 120 people ships constantly—we average 180+ deployments per week across 85 microservices. Our Platform team exists because we believe developers shouldn't waste time on infrastructure toil. We build the Internal Developer Platform that makes our engineers more productive, and we treat it like a product—because our users are developers.
**What makes our Platform team different:**
- We measure success by developer adoption, not infrastructure uptime
- We run monthly developer surveys and act on feedback within weeks
- We've reduced deployment time from 45 minutes to 5 minutes
- We operate with a 95% self-service rate—no tickets for standard infrastructure
- We ship internal features as fast as our product teams ship external ones
## The Role
We're hiring a Platform Engineer to join our 8-person Platform team. You'll report to the Director of Platform Engineering and work alongside platform engineers, SREs, and developer experience specialists.
**This is product engineering for developers.**
Your users are the 120 engineers at [Company]. Your success isn't measured by uptime alone—it's measured by whether developers choose to use what you build, whether they're more productive because of it, and whether they recommend your platform to their teammates. You're building a product, not managing infrastructure.
**The challenge you'll tackle:**
Our platform has strong foundations, but we're scaling fast. We need to level up our self-service capabilities, improve our developer portal, and build golden paths that make the right way the easy way. Developers should be able to go from idea to production without filing tickets or waiting for approvals.
## Objectives of This Role
- Increase self-service infrastructure adoption from 95% to 99%
- Reduce time-to-first-deployment for new hires from 3 days to 4 hours
- Build golden paths for common service patterns (API, worker, scheduled job)
- Improve platform NPS from +42 to +60 through better tooling and documentation
- Enable 50+ new microservices per quarter without growing platform headcount
## Responsibilities
- Design and build self-service infrastructure provisioning for databases, caches, queues, and environments
- Develop platform APIs and CLIs that abstract Kubernetes complexity into simple, developer-friendly interfaces
- Build and improve our Backstage-based developer portal—service catalog, templates, and documentation
- Create golden path templates that encode best practices for security, observability, and scalability
- Conduct developer interviews, analyze platform usage data, and iterate based on feedback
- Write documentation, tutorials, and runbooks that scale knowledge across the engineering org
- Implement GitOps workflows for infrastructure changes with proper guardrails and rollback capabilities
- Design multi-tenant isolation, resource quotas, and cost visibility for platform services
- Collaborate with Security to bake compliance and audit logging into platform defaults
- Participate in on-call rotation for platform services (1 week every 8 weeks)
## Required Skills and Qualifications
- 4+ years of platform engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps experience
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes—operators, CRDs, multi-tenancy, networking, and troubleshooting production issues
- Strong Infrastructure as Code skills with Terraform—modules, state management, testing, and drift detection
- Experience designing APIs (REST or gRPC) that developers consume—you've built interfaces, not just backends
- Demonstrated developer empathy—you've gathered feedback, measured adoption, and iterated on developer tools
- Programming proficiency in Go or Python for building tooling, operators, and automation
- Experience with observability systems—Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, structured logging
- Comfort with on-call responsibilities and incident response
## Preferred Skills and Qualifications
- Experience building or extending Backstage developer portals
- Familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
- Background with GitOps tools like ArgoCD or Flux
- Experience building Kubernetes operators or custom controllers
- Track record of improving measurable developer productivity metrics
- Contributions to open-source platform tooling (Crossplane, Backstage plugins, etc.)
- Fintech or regulated industry experience
## Tech Stack
- **Orchestration:** Kubernetes (EKS) with custom operators
- **Infrastructure as Code:** Terraform, Crossplane for Kubernetes-native provisioning
- **Developer Portal:** Backstage with custom plugins
- **GitOps:** ArgoCD for application and infrastructure deployments
- **CI/CD:** GitHub Actions, Buildkite for builds, ArgoCD for deployments
- **Cloud:** AWS (EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, S3)
- **Observability:** Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty
- **Secrets:** HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes integration
- **Service Mesh:** Istio for service-to-service communication
- **Languages:** Go (primary for platform tooling), Python, TypeScript
## Developer Experience Metrics
We believe in transparency about where we are and where we're going. Here's what we measure:
- **Deployment time:** Reduced from 45 minutes to 5 minutes (target: under 3 minutes)
- **Self-service rate:** 95% of infrastructure provisioned via platform (target: 99%)
- **Time to first deployment (new hire):** 3 days (target: 4 hours)
- **Time to production (new service):** 2 days (target: 2 hours with golden paths)
- **Platform NPS:** +42 from quarterly developer surveys (target: +60)
- **Support tickets per week:** 15 platform-related tickets (target: under 5)
- **Golden path adoption:** 60% of new services use templates (target: 90%)
- **Developer hours saved per month:** ~800 hours (target: 1,500+ hours)
## Compensation and Benefits
**Salary:** $165,000 - $210,000 (based on experience)
**Equity:** 0.05% - 0.15% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)
**Benefits:**
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee, 80% dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $4,000 annual learning budget for conferences, courses, and certifications
- $2,000 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- On-call compensation: $600/week when primary
- Flexible hybrid work (2-3 days in Seattle office)
- Monthly team events and quarterly off-sites
## Interview Process
Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We use real problems from our platform roadmap.
- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min) - We'll discuss your background and what you're looking for in a platform role.
- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min) - Platform engineering experience, Kubernetes and IaC fundamentals.
- **Step 3: Platform Design** (60 min) - Design a self-service feature for a real developer problem.
- **Step 4: Developer Experience** (45 min) - How you gather feedback, measure adoption, and iterate on tools.
- **Step 5: Coding Session** (60 min) - Build platform tooling like a Kubernetes operator or CLI tool.
- **Step 6: Team & Culture** (45 min) - Meet platform team members and actual platform users.
You'll receive feedback within 48 hours of each stage. No LeetCode puzzles or gotcha questions.
## Equal Opportunity
[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We believe the best platforms are built by diverse teams who bring different perspectives on how developers work. We're committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work.
We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
If you need accommodations during the interview process, let us know and we'll make it work.
---
*Ready to build the platform that makes 120 engineers more productive? Apply now.*