Infra Engineer (contract)

About Aspen FT:
Aspen FT builds RAID, whose AI agents tell banks and hedge funds where a market move hits them, and how hard, in seconds. Built by the experts called in after the market's biggest failures.

The role:
You will move RAID, our Python (FastAPI) app, from managed hosting to its own cloud, ready for bank and hedge fund data. We want a very sharp generalist to work directly with our founding team.

What you will deliver:

• Cloud in code. AWS production and staging in Terraform or similar, deployed from GitHub.
• Secure data intake. Client files, from spreadsheets to daily feeds, land in an S3 bucket or endpoint and are checked and logged on arrival: sender, time, exact contents. Data never leaves the cloud.
• Fresh daily engine run. Results stored each day with their data and engine version, so screens load in seconds and releases recompute nothing.
• Fast screens. Every screen open in a few seconds; we already time each one.
• Security and audit readiness. Encryption, least privilege, per-client separation, audit logs, backups and recovery; ready for SOC 2 and bank vendor reviews.
• Runs without you. Monitoring, alerts, cost tracking and documentation; no repeated step needs someone at a keyboard.

What you bring:

• 5+ years building and running production cloud infrastructure, ideally as a startup's first infrastructure hire.
• Infrastructure as code: Terraform, Pulumi or AWS CDK.
• Deep AWS: networking, IAM, S3, KMS, ECS or Kubernetes, managed databases.
• Strong Python, including FastAPI and caching.
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions) and monitoring (Datadog, Grafana or CloudWatch).
• Security fundamentals and SOC 2 or similar audit experience.
• Fluent English, written and spoken.
• Clear writing on trade-offs and costs for non-engineers.

Nice to have:

• Financial services: bank vendor reviews, SEC and FINRA record-keeping, model risk (SR 11-7).
• Scheduled pipelines (Dagster, Airflow, Step Functions) and Redis.
• Data residency, multi-region, or deploying into a client's own cloud.
• Compliance automation (Vanta, Drata).

Terms:

• 3-month contract, renewable depending on business need.
• USD 3,000 to 4,000 a month.