Senior Platform Engineer (DevOps)

ActiveProspect, Inc. • Austin, TX

2d

About The Position

You own outcomes for the engineers you serve, not tickets. You find the friction slowing teams down and remove it for everyone at once — and you do it with the autonomy and judgment to decide what's worth building, what isn't, and when to say no. Platform is a force multiplier. We build self-service tooling, paved roads, and automation that any team can adopt without us in the loop. The systems you build and run power products that serve hundreds of millions of requests per day, and the abstractions you ship determine how fast every product engineer at ActiveProspect can build and deploy. When you build something well here, one change makes dozens of engineers faster. The technical bar is high, but raw skill is the floor here, not the ceiling. What sets this role apart is judgment: knowing which friction is worth removing, when a smaller fix beats a bigger one, when to build a reusable capability instead of a one-off, and when AI output is good enough versus when to dig in yourself. You'll set technical direction for how we deploy, observe, secure, and operate our infrastructure — and raise the bar for the engineers around you.

Requirements

• 5+ years building, operating, and owning production infrastructure at scale, with a track record of platform work that made many engineers faster.
• Deep expertise in a cloud environment (AWS) and with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes / EKS, Helm).
• Strong command of CI/CD and GitOps (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) and Git-based workflows.
• Hands-on expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and configuration automation.
• Solid grasp of Linux (Ubuntu), production databases (PostgreSQL/RDS, DynamoDB, MySQL, MongoDB), and networking (load balancers, firewalls, routing, VPN).
• A track record of shipping something you cared about end-to-end and owning the outcome — and the instinct to solve a problem once, reusably, rather than the same problem over and over.
• Treats developer experience as a product — measures adoption and delivery metrics (e.g., DORA) and iterates on tooling the way a PM iterates on a feature.
• Strong systems-design judgment in ambiguous contexts, and the ability to descope well and push back on low-value work.
• Experience leading incidents and operating customer-facing production environments with a focus on uptime and service quality.
• Uses AI agents and coding tools as a daily driver — reads their output critically and builds automation on top of them, not just consumes them.
• Clear written and verbal communication, plus mentorship experience — you make the people around you more productive.
• A security and reliability mindset that fits working with sensitive consumer data.
• A 4-year degree in engineering or computer science

Nice To Haves

• Experience building an internal developer platform or paved-road tooling adopted across multiple teams.
• Deep observability and telemetry experience (OpenTelemetry, Datadog), including SLOs and alerting strategy.
• Experience operating microservices, serverless (AWS Lambda), or event streaming (Apache Kafka / Confluent) at scale.
• Secrets management at scale (AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler).
• Experience with multi-account AWS, distributed database systems, or high-throughput data pipelines.
• Programming experience with Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript/Node.js, or Python.
• Ownership of compliance frameworks (SOC 2, GDPR) end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes end-to-end. Frame the problem, design the solution, ship it, and own whether it actually moved the metric. Descope to the cheapest version that works, and prototype in days, not weeks.
• Build for self-service, not for tickets. Treat the platform as a product and internal engineers as your customers. Understand their friction, then solve it with reusable, well-documented tooling that teams adopt on their own — so the fix scales to everyone, not just the team that asked.
• Own and evolve the paved road. Set the direction for our GitOps, Kubernetes (AWS EKS / ArgoCD), and serverless (AWS Lambda) patterns so the easy path is also the secure, reliable, and cost-aware one — and lead the migrations that get us there.
• Own reliability. Lead incident response for the systems you own, drive blameless postmortems, and turn what you learn into durable fixes. Set the on-call practices that keep us meeting our SLAs without burning people out.
• Architect AI-driven leverage. Design and operate AI agents and automation that hold up in production — auto-triage, auto-remediation, agent-assisted CI/CD — and set the guardrails, evals, and cost controls that keep them safe. Evolve the team’s practices as the tooling changes. We expect everyone here to build with AI, not just be aware of it.
• Own access, security, and compliance. Design how we manage credentials and permissions for developers and automated processes. Consent and PII handling are central to customer trust, so security is built into every system you own. Lead our SOC 2 and GDPR work and the remediation that follows.
• Make things cheaper. Own initiatives that measurably reduce infrastructure cost.
• Multiply the team. Mentor on judgment and systems thinking, not just syntax. Write decision memos and ADRs, set standards, and bring patterns and hard-won context back to the wider org instead of hoarding them.

Benefits

• You'll report to an Engineering Manager who owns delivery health and stakeholder alignment, while you own technical direction for the platform — often acting as the player-coach Tech Lead for the work in flight. We partner with product teams to understand their needs and deliver through self-service tooling and automation. Success looks like product teams that ship faster on tooling you built, friction removed for many teams at once, incidents handled calmly, decisions made fast, and engineers who level up because they worked with you.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior