Senior Platform Engineer

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. 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 Improve Secure 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 Collaborate Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements 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 Base Range $244,000 $292,000 USD 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, p ... (truncated, view full listing at source)