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
• 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
• Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability systems
• Build documentation and runbooks that empower teams to self-serve
• Work with product teams to understand friction points
• 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
• Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements

Improve & Secure

Collaborate

• 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.

💰 US salary range for this full-time position consists of base + equity + benefits

🏥 Medical, dental, and vision coverage - Kikoff covers the full cost of health insurance for the employee!

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 information for more information:https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_files/employers/poster_screen_reader_optimized.pdfhttps://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/posters/pdf/OFCCP_EEO_Supplement_Final_JRF_QA_508c.pdf 

If you need reasonable accommodation for a job opening please connect with us at talent@kikoff.com and describe the specific accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation. Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Kikoff will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.