Head of Platform & Cloud Engineering

RapidRatings•Quincy, MA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

RapidRatings is a financial technology company focused on enhancing transparency and resilience in the global economy through quantitative financial health intelligence. This role is for a deeply technical senior leader responsible for the cloud platform, resilience, security, and AI infrastructure that powers RapidRatings' products. The position combines deep systems engineering with modern SRE practices, covering low-level cloud architecture, high-scale distributed systems, and platform engineering. The Head of Platform & Cloud Engineering will lead the SRE team, establish operational excellence, and build the foundational infrastructure for AI systems, agents, and product squads, leveraging AI and developer self-service to reduce routine tasks.

Requirements

Deep, hands-on experience running production Kubernetes (EKS) at scale.
Deep, hands-on experience across the native AWS stack (EKS/ECS, IAM, VPC networking, CloudFront, Lambda, RDS/DynamoDB).
Proficiency with infrastructure as code (Terraform / OpenTofu).
Strong foundation in Linux internals, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, routing), performance tuning, and operating distributed systems at scale.
Direct experience implementing and maintaining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 technical controls within cloud-native environments.
Proficiency in Python, Go, or Bash for building platform tooling, custom telemetry, and automated remediation.
Hands-on exposure to model-hosting patterns, vector databases, API gateways, and LLM orchestration infrastructure.
Track record of managing distributed SRE/infrastructure teams, including international squads.

Nice To Haves

Treat AI as a strong collaborator, building platforms and guardrails that lift the whole engineering group.
Bring a calm, positive attitude under pressure, including during production incidents and against tight deadlines.

Responsibilities

Architect high-availability, multi-region AWS infrastructure optimized for scale, latency, resilience, and structural reliability.
Lead the SRE function to establish robust telemetry, SLO frameworks, and rigorous root-cause analysis through blameless post-incident reviews.
Drive self-healing automation that minimizes operational overhead and mean-time-to-recovery.
Build and operate the model-serving layer, routing pipelines, cost attribution, and governance frameworks for AI agents, copilots, and Platform Model Context Protocols (MCPs).
Own the platform's threat detection and defense, embedding SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls into infrastructure code and automated guardrails.
Design self-service infrastructure patterns for engineering squads to ship securely and efficiently, while continuously driving cloud cost optimization.
Manage distributed SRE/infrastructure teams, including international squads, while remaining directly involved in architectural design.
Set technical direction and influence others through standards, design review, documentation, and mentoring.
Communicate clearly across all levels, from technical specialists to the executive group.