Staff Platform Engineer

Summary Are you a systems-minded engineer who thrives on building resilient infrastructure, driving operational excellence, and enabling teams to move fast with confidence? As a Staff Platform Engineer at Topstep, you’ll set the technical direction for how we approach infrastructure, reliability, and operational excellence across the engineering organization. This is a role that blends deep infrastructure expertise with SRE leadership you’ll be as comfortable tuning Terraform modules and Kubernetes manifests as you are defining SLOs, shaping incident response culture, and mentoring engineers on production ownership. You’ll own the strategy for our AWS infrastructure, observability stack, and platform tooling while driving the practices that let product teams ship with speed and confidence. You’ll influence architectural decisions across teams, close the gaps that prevent fast diagnosis of production issues, and build the foundations of a mature, unified platform engineering function. This role is ideal for someone who brings both hands-on technical depth and a builder’s mindset, someone excited to define best practices from the ground up, embed reliability into engineering culture, and shape what operational excellence looks like at a fast-growing fintech company. Key Responsibilities Provide technical leadership for infrastructure, reliability, and observability, driving architectural decisions and platform standards. Build and mature the platform engineering practice defining SLOs, incident response protocols, on-call standards, and operational runbooks. Own the observability stack using Datadog (metrics, APM, logging, distributed tracing) and CloudWatch, instrumenting systems and closing gaps that currently prevent fast diagnosis of production issues. Design and evolve AWS infrastructure (EKS, Aurora, ElastiCache, SQS, CloudFront) for reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. Own and evolve CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and release engineering practices across the organization. Drive infrastructure-as-code strategy with Terraform across a multi-account AWS environment, ensuring consistency and repeatability. Lead incident response and blameless post-mortems, turning outages into opportunities for systematic improvement. Partner with product engineering teams to embed reliability principles early in the design process and improve system resilience. Mentor engineers across the organization on infrastructure, reliability practices, operational thinking, and production ownership. Champion a culture of transparency, continuous improvement, and shared ownership of production systems. Required Qualifications and Key Competencies 7+ years of professional experience in Platform Engineering, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering, with demonstrated impact building practices that scaled across multiple teams. Proven track record either starting a platform/SRE function from scratch or scaling an existing practice with measurable improvements to MTTR, MTTD, change failure rate, or availability. Deep expertise with AWS infrastructure (EKS, EC2, RDS/Aurora, VPC, ALB/NLB, CloudFront, SQS) running production services at scale. Strong proficiency with Datadog for end-to-end observability (metrics, APM, logs, distributed tracing) and building alerting that catches real issues without causing fatigue. Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, CodePipeline, or similar), writing automation (Bash, Python), and contributing to platform tooling. Strong proficiency with Kubernetes in production cluster operations, networking, security, scaling strategies, and GitOps workflows. Solid foundation in distributed systems, networking, database performance, and debugging complex system failures across service boundaries. Deep familiarity with Terraform for multi-account, multi-environment infrastructure management. Track record of influencing engineering culture through doc ... (truncated, view full listing at source)