Staff Platform Engineer

ABOUT EARNIN

As one of the first pioneers of earned wage access, our passion at EarnIn is building products that deliver real-time financial flexibility for those with the unique needs of living paycheck to paycheck. Our community members access their earnings as they earn them, with options to spend, save, and grow their money without mandatory fees, interest rates, or credit checks.

We’re fortunate to have an incredibly experienced leadership team with world-class funding partners like A16Z, Matrix Partners, DST, Ribbit Capital, and a very healthy core business with a tremendous runway. We’re growing fast and are excited to continue bringing world-class talent onboard to help shape the next chapter of our growth journey.

POSITION SUMMARY

EarnIn is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to lead our cloud infrastructure's strategic design, automation, and optimization. This role drives innovation in cloud operations, enables rapid development, and scaling solutions across teams and systems. As a senior technical leader on our Platform team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of EarnIn’s cloud platform, influencing both operational efficiency and customer experience.

This is a highly visible and impactful role within the organization, designed for those who excel at thinking critically about the needs of a rapidly growing company and can anticipate and solve complex cloud challenges at scale. You will be hands-on, leading technical deep dives across operating systems, networks, application performance, storage, and databases while driving high-level strategy and mentoring other engineers. The US base salary range for this full-time position is $206,600 - $308,000 plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. This hybrid position in Palo Alto will require in-office work 2-3 days a week if possible, though the team is open to remote candidates.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Serve as a key architect and thought leader in the cloud infrastructure domain, guiding the team on best practices for building resilient, high-performance systems. Mentor and coach senior engineers across the company in advanced cloud operations practices.
• Provide oversight of hosted Linux and Windows systems, networks, databases, and applications, identifying and solving critical performance, scalability, and stability challenges across the company.
• Design and develop reusable components and operational strategies to enhance cloud systems' scalability, performance, and monitoring. Collaborate with other senior engineers to create technical solutions that address company-wide cloud challenges.
• Lead the establishment and continuous evolution of infrastructure-as-code best practices, driving automation, self-healing, and security standards throughout the company’s cloud ecosystems.
• Drive operational cost savings through service optimizations, autoscaling strategies, and distributed processing architectures, partnering with the finance team to ensure ongoing efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including security, engineering, and business teams, to ensure that operational strategies align with company-wide objectives. Provide thought leadership in company-wide initiatives such as observability, automation, and disaster recovery.
• Continuously evaluate existing tools and processes and lead efforts to socialize, present, and implement enhancements for optimal operational efficiency.
• Develop high-quality documentation on best practices, installation, provisioning, and configuration. Ensure organizational alignment on cloud operations standards.
• Participate in and lead on-call rotations, using post-mortems to guide long-term improvements to system reliability.
• Act as a liaison between cloud operations and business stakeholders, presenting technical information in an understandable format, ensuring alignment between technical decisions and business objectives.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent industry experience.
• 7+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, managing large-scale, high-availability, customer-facing distributed systems.
• Proven experience mentoring and guiding senior engineers, driving technical decisions, and leading company-wide cloud initiatives.
• Mastery of public cloud providers, specifically AWS (EKS, DynamoDB, Aurora, Kinesis, etc.).
• Strong expertise in containerized microservices running on Kubernetes, with the ability to guide the implementation of complex, scalable solutions.
• Deep knowledge of automation and configuration management tools (Terraform, Ansible) with the ability to lead infrastructure-as-code initiatives.
• Experience with advanced observability tools (DataDog, CloudWatch) and driving metrics-driven decisions across the organization.
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional initiatives with engineering, product, and business teams to align cloud strategies with business goals.
• Strong adherence to industry best practices around privacy and security, with a demonstrated ability to lead compliance efforts.

At EarnIn, we believe that the best way to build a financial system that works for everyday people is by hiring a team that represents our diverse community. Our team is diverse not only in background and experience but also in perspective. We celebrate our diversity and strive to create a culture of belonging. EarnIn does not unlawfully discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, legally protected medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws. EarnIn is an E-Verify participant.

EarnIn does not accept unsolicited resumes from individual recruiters or third-party recruiting agencies in response to job postings. No fee will be paid to third parties who submit unsolicited candidates directly to our hiring managers or HR team.

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