Software Engineering Lead, Infrastructure

Kaizen Labs • New York, NY

66d

About The Position

As our Infrastructure Lead, you’ll be laying the foundation for this mission - building the systems that ensure our platform is scalable, reliable, and compliant. You’ll be the person who takes us from a scrappy early-stage setup to infrastructure that can power thousands of municipalities across the country. If you’re excited about building modern infrastructure from the ground up and making a real-world impact, this role is for you. You will be responsible for building and owning the infrastructure that underpins our platform - scaling, load testing, developer tooling, monitoring, and hosting support for customer environments (including high-compliance environments). This is a highly technical role with leadership responsibility: ~80% hands-on engineering and ~20% people management. You’ll collaborate closely with product teams to design robust developer tooling, consolidate our cloud footprint, and ensure our platform is reliable, secure, and ready to scale.

Requirements

• 6+ years of infrastructure or DevOps engineering experience.
• Proven experience building 0→1 cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP strongly preferred).
• Proficiency with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes (or equivalent cloud-native tools).
• Experience in high-compliance environments (government, healthcare, finance, or public companies).
• Strong background in observability and monitoring (Datadog, Sentry, or similar).
• Comfortable leading projects and/or teams, or owning complex infrastructure initiatives.
• A 'builder' mentality: you’ve walked into messy infra setups and transformed them into scalable, reliable systems.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience at an early-stage company where you were the first infra hire or helped scale a small infra team.
• Familiarity with multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies.

Responsibilities

• Build and execute the infrastructure roadmap, defining priorities and driving adoption.
• Own and consolidate our cloud footprint.
• Manage infrastructure and observability tools (Datadog, Sentry, etc.) and expand their effectiveness.
• Collaborate with product engineers to build scalable dev tooling and CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead and mentor a small team while remaining a strong IC.
• Ensure compliance-ready infrastructure for government and other highly regulated environments.
• Make high-level architectural decisions to evolve our platform from early-stage infrastructure into enterprise-grade operations.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Health Coverage with 85% of premiums covered for employees on the Platinum plan.
• Dental and Vision coverage with Kaizen paying 99% of premiums for employees.
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA & Dependent Care FSA).
• $100,000 in fully paid life insurance.
• 401(k) access through Guideline.
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave for birthing parents and 10 weeks for non-birthing parents.
• $50/month toward your commute.
• One-time setup stipend (up to $750) for your home or NYC office.
• $100/month for wellness or productivity.
• $250/year for recreation.
• $500/year for professional development.
• Expensed lunch three days a week when you're in the office.
• Unlimited PTO and all federal holidays off.
• A company-wide winter break during the week of Christmas.

What This Job Offers

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