Staff Platform Development Engineer

Clearwater Analytics•Chicago, IL

1d•$148,200 - $200,852

About The Position

We build and operate the infrastructure backbone that powers one of the financial services industry's most demanding SaaS platforms. Our Platform Engineering team sits at the intersection of DevOps, private and public cloud infrastructure, and financial technology — ensuring that mission-critical investment accounting, portfolio analytics, and data connectivity services run with carrier-grade reliability, 24/7, for over a thousand of the largest hedge funds, asset managers, family offices, insurers and corporations. We move fast, take ownership, and operate with a low-ego, high-output mentality. Engineers here have real impact — not just tickets to close. We've scaled significantly over the last several years, expanding our global footprint, deepening our cloud-native infrastructure, and modernizing the financial data pipelines that connect our platform to custodians, prime brokers, data vendors, and counterparties. If you want to work on problems that actually matter in FinTech — at serious scale — you've found the right team. We're looking for a seasoned Staff Platform Engineer who can own the full stack of infrastructure concerns — from bare metal and virtualization layers up through container orchestration, observability, and CI/CD pipelines. This isn't a ticket-taker role. You'll be a principal contributor shaping how we architect, automate, and scale the platform that underpins our clients' most sensitive financial operations. You'll work closely with software engineering, security, data operations, and client connectivity teams. You'll also serve as a senior escalation point for complex infrastructure and platform issues — including those that touch financial data feeds, custody integrations, and low-latency market data ingestion. Experience operating in a regulated financial environment is a meaningful advantage here.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in platform engineering, Linux systems administration, or DevOps/SRE roles — with at least 3 years in a financial services or FinTech environment.
Deep, hands-on expertise with RHEL and Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu preferred); strong command-line proficiency and systems-level diagnostic ability.
Production-grade experience with Kubernetes (cluster operations, Helm, RBAC, networking, storage); familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd) is a strong plus.
Proven infrastructure automation experience using Ansible, Salt, Terraform, or equivalent IaC tooling — not just writing playbooks, but designing automation frameworks.
Solid experience with CI/CD platforms (GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker) and software delivery pipeline design.
Hands-on experience with observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic Stack (ELK/EFK), or equivalent enterprise monitoring and log aggregation tooling.
Strong working knowledge of Java applications and JVM internals — tuning, GC analysis, heap profiling — given the prevalence of Java-based financial platform services.
Familiarity with financial data connectivity concepts: FIX protocol, SWIFT messaging, SFTP/FTPS-based file transfer workflows, market data feed management (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, etc.), and custodian data integration patterns.
Working knowledge of relational database systems (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and non-relational/time-series data stores in the context of financial data platforms.
Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, TLS/PKI, load balancing, VPN/MPLS, firewall policy — especially as applied to host-based and data center environments.
Demonstrated comfort and fluency with AI-assisted workflows — actively leverages AI tools (e.g., Claude or equivalent) to accelerate troubleshooting, automate documentation, generate and review infrastructure-as-code, and augment engineering output; treats AI as a force multiplier, not a novelty.
Solid scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or equivalent; experience with API-driven infrastructure management is expected.
Experience working within SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or equivalent compliance frameworks; understanding of audit evidence, access control, and change management requirements.
Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can write a clear post-mortem, explain a network topology to a non-technical stakeholder, and document a runbook others can actually follow.

Nice To Haves

Experience with hybrid and public cloud platforms (AWS EC2/EKS/RDS/S3) — including cost governance and FinOps awareness.
Familiarity with server virtualization and private cloud platforms (ProxMox, VMware vSphere, or equivalent).
Exposure to financial regulatory environments: SEC, FINRA, MiFID II, or similar — and the infrastructure implications they carry.
Experience with secrets management and certificate lifecycle tooling (HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk, Let's Encrypt / internal PKI).
Background in investment management, portfolio accounting, or wealth management platform infrastructure is a meaningful differentiator.
Linux certifications: RHCA, RHCE, CKA/CKAD, or equivalent are a plus.
Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain scalable, highly available infrastructure supporting a multi-tenant financial SaaS platform — including on-premises systems, hybrid cloud environments (AWS), and co-location data centers.
Lead platform automation efforts using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tooling such as Harbor, Terraform, Ansible, or Salt — driving consistency, repeatability, and auditability across all environments.
Own and evolve our container orchestration strategy — including Kubernetes cluster operations, workload scheduling, resource governance, and service mesh configuration.
Architect and operate CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation in collaboration with software engineering and release management teams; drive DevOps best practices across the SDLC.
Build and maintain a comprehensive observability stack — including metrics (Prometheus/Grafana), log aggregation (Elastic Stack / CheckMk), and distributed tracing — with a focus on financial platform SLIs -> SLOs -> OLAs -> SLAs.
Support and optimize financial data connectivity infrastructure, including market data feed handlers, custodian data ingestion pipelines, FIX/SWIFT/SFTP-based integrations, and third-party data vendor connectivity.
Provide Tier 2/3 escalation support for platform-level incidents; lead root cause analysis and drive permanent resolution of systemic reliability issues.
Perform capacity planning, performance engineering, and infrastructure cost optimization across compute, storage, and network layers.
Partner with the Security and Compliance teams to ensure infrastructure adherence to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and applicable financial industry regulatory requirements.
Evaluate emerging technologies and vendor solutions; make architectural recommendations grounded in operational maturity and business impact.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; contribute to team documentation, runbooks, and internal knowledge base standards.