Head of Platform & Cloud Engineering

RapidRatings•Quincy, MA

2d•$145,000 - $174,500•Hybrid

About The Position

We are hiring a deeply technical senior leader to own the cloud platform, resilience, security posture, and AI infrastructure powering RapidRatings' products. The role blends deep systems engineering with modern SRE practice, bridging low-level cloud architecture, high-scale distributed systems, and platform engineering. As AI and developer self-service absorb routine pipeline toil, you will raise the technical bar for operational excellence, lead our SRE team, and build the paved-road infrastructure our AI systems, agents, and product squads run on.

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) and 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, while remaining directly involved in architectural design.

Nice To Haves

A natural problem solver who stays curious, works logically, and digs past symptoms to root cause.
Treats AI as a strong collaborator, building the platforms and guardrails that lift the whole engineering group rather than only your own output.

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 minimises operational overhead and mean-time-to-recovery.
Build and operate the model-serving layer, routing pipelines, cost attribution, and governance frameworks for our AI agents, copilots, and Platform Model Context Protocols (MCPs).
Own the platform's threat detection and defense.
Embed SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls directly into infrastructure code and automated guardrails.
Design self-service infrastructure patterns so engineering squads ship securely and without friction, while continuously driving cloud cost optimization.
Set technical direction and carry others with you through standards, design review, documentation, and mentoring.
Communicate clearly across every tier, from technical specialists to the executive group, with meticulous attention to detail.
Bring a calm, positive attitude under pressure, including during production incidents and against tight deadlines.