Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Kikoff•San Francisco, CA

18h•$307,000 - $352,000

About The Position

Kikoff's infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering teams to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline. The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure. As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own high-leverage infrastructure problems from design through production operation and help run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. You will build internal products and paved paths that turn ambiguous problems into durable systems. Your work should improve delivery speed and reliability, reduce cost, and reduce the amount of operational work product teams carry. This is a hands-on Staff IC role. You will foster relationships, write code, review designs, make architecture decisions, lead through incidents, and help engineers solve problems outside the runbook. You will have a primary area of depth and enough range to follow production problems across infrastructure boundaries. AI is increasing the amount of code and change moving through our systems. You will help build a platform that can absorb that growth without creating more incidents, unsustainable cost, or a team that depends on heroics.

Requirements

7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of Staff-level technical impact.
Sustained ownership of a consequential production system. You have operated what you built, handled incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and improved the system afterward.
Strong coding skills in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, or a similar language. You can build production software, not only configure tools.
Production experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and the security boundaries around them.
Experienced generalist judgment. You have depth in at least one infrastructure domain and can learn quickly across adjacent ones.
A track record of building platform capabilities that engineers adopted because they solved real problems and were easier to use than one-off alternatives.
Clear, direct communication. You can explain a technical decision, its evidence, and its tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners.

Nice To Haves

Deep experience in one or more of observability, developer productivity, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, or security.
Experience with Pulumi and TypeScript on AWS, including ECS or Fargate, k8s, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, and IAM.
Experience building and operating an early-stage platform through rapid growth in fintech or another regulated environment.

Responsibilities

Build and Own Critical Platform Systems: Design and implement self-service infrastructure on AWS using reusable code and infrastructure-as-code patterns. We use Pulumi, HCL, and TypeScript heavily. The company runs on Ruby.
Own the systems you build in production, including reliability, security, capacity, cost, upgrades, incidents, and recovery.
Give critical services an SLO, actionable alerts, a useful dashboard, a runbook, and a tested recovery path.
Automate recurring operational work and eliminate failure-prone manual steps rather than allowing them to become permanent processes.
Run Infrastructure as a Product: Work directly with engineers to turn recurring friction into paved paths, self-service tools, and automated workflows that are faster and safer than one-off solutions.
Measure outcomes for internal customers through adoption, developer feedback, delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load.
Use the fastest responsible path when a team is blocked, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability.
Set Technical Direction: Set technical direction for ambiguous infrastructure work, then carry it from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and production ownership.
Make clear trade-offs among delivery speed, reliability, security, cost, and long-term operational complexity.
Partner across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Product Engineering to build security and compliance controls into normal engineering workflows.
Raise the Engineering Bar: Review code and designs, challenge weak assumptions, help other engineers make better technical decisions, and uphold high standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability.
Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and ensure the system is better after service is restored.
Create standards, reusable patterns, and durable documentation that improve how teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software.