Senior Platform Engineer

inKind•Austin, TX

About The Position

The Senior Platform Engineer at inKind is responsible for owning, evolving, and operating our cloud infrastructure as the foundation of a growing financial and hospitality technology platform. This role exists to ensure that our systems are secure, reliable, observable, and capable of scaling as both traffic and organizational complexity increase. This is a deeply technical, hands-on role with real ownership. You will design, implement, and operate our AWS infrastructure; make forward-looking decisions about how our platform should evolve; and carry those decisions through implementation, migration, and steady-state operation. When the platform changes—new AWS services, runtime upgrades, architecture shifts—you are ahead of it, not reacting to it. You’ll work closely with application engineers, but your focus is the platform itself: compute, networking, data stores, deployment workflows, observability, and operational correctness. In a small but growing team, this role sets the standard for how infrastructure is designed, changed, and trusted.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure in cloud environments
Deep experience with AWS core services (EC2, ECS/EKS, VPC, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, ALB/NLB, CloudWatch, etc.)
Strong understanding of containerized workloads and orchestration tradeoffs
Proven experience designing systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and controlled failure
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent)
Demonstrated ability to plan and execute infrastructure migrations safely
Experience debugging real production incidents involving networking, scaling, or service degradation

Nice To Haves

Experience operating infrastructure for financial systems or other high-reliability domains
Firsthand experience scaling infrastructure through periods of rapid growth
Strong opinions about observability and operational hygiene, informed by past failures
Experience simplifying, retiring, or rearchitecting over-engineered infrastructure
Comfort working closely with a Rails-based application stack while remaining tool-agnostic

Responsibilities

Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, and managed services
Design and maintain infrastructure that supports high availability, predictable performance, and financial correctness
Lead platform-level architectural decisions, including service migrations and runtime changes (e.g., Redis → Valkey, EKS → ECS/Fargate)
Ensure infrastructure choices align with reliability, cost, and operational simplicity—not just trend adoption
Design and maintain deployment pipelines that are safe, repeatable, and observable
Own system reliability through capacity planning, failure modeling, and controlled change management
Lead incident response and root-cause analysis for infrastructure-level failures
Participate in on-call rotations and continuously improve operational ergonomics
Build and maintain strong observability across infrastructure and services (metrics, logs, tracing, alerting)
Ensure secure configuration of AWS resources, IAM policies, secrets management, and network boundaries
Proactively identify infrastructure risks related to scale, cost, or security and address them before they become incidents
Partner closely with application engineers to ensure platform constraints and capabilities are well understood
Drive infrastructure changes through hands-on implementation
Establish standards and best practices for infrastructure, deployment, and operations as the team grows
Mentor other platform engineers and help raise the overall operational maturity of the organization