Platform Engineer

The Platform Engineer at inKind is responsible for helping build, evolve, and operate our cloud infrastructure as the foundation of a growing financial and hospitality technology platform. This role ensures that our systems are secure, reliable, observable, and capable of scaling as both traffic and organizational complexity increase.

This is a technical, hands-on role with meaningful ownership. You will help design, implement, and operate our AWS infrastructure; contribute to decisions about how our platform should evolve; and support those decisions through implementation, migration, and steady-state operation. As the platform changes—new AWS services, runtime upgrades, architecture shifts—you’ll help evaluate, implement, and operate those changes safely.

You’ll work closely with application engineers and other members of the platform team, with a focus on the platform itself: compute, networking, data stores, deployment workflows, observability, and operational correctness. In a small but growing team, you’ll contribute to how infrastructure is designed, changed, and trusted.

Who you are

• Infrastructure Owner: You take responsibility for the systems you work on in production and care about their behavior over time
• Systems Thinker: You understand how compute, storage, networking, and application behavior interact under real load
• Pragmatic Operator: You understand the importance of balancing modernization with stability and operational simplicity
• Thoughtful Problem Solver: You can evaluate infrastructure tradeoffs (EKS vs ECS, Redis vs Valkey, EC2 vs Fargate) and contribute to making and implementing the right decisions
• Operationally Grounded: You have experience running systems in production, responding to incidents, and learning from failures
• Security-Aware: You understand principles such as least privilege, network isolation, and secure defaults
• Clear Communicator: You can explain infrastructure decisions, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to other engineers and stakeholders

Role Responsibilities

Platform & Cloud Infrastructure

• Help build, operate, 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
• Contribute to platform-level architectural decisions, including service migrations and runtime changes (e.g., Redis → Valkey, EKS → ECS/Fargate)
• Help ensure infrastructure choices align with reliability, cost, and operational simplicity—not just trend adoption

Deployment, Reliability & Operations

• Build and maintain deployment pipelines that are safe, repeatable, and observable
• Contribute to system reliability through capacity planning, failure modeling, and controlled change management
• Participate in incident response and root-cause analysis for infrastructure-level failures
• Participate in on-call rotations and help continuously improve operational ergonomics

Observability, Security & Governance

• Build and maintain strong observability across infrastructure and services (metrics, logs, tracing, alerting)
• Help ensure secure configuration of AWS resources, IAM policies, secrets management, and network boundaries
• Identify infrastructure risks related to scale, cost, or security and partner with the team to address them before they become incidents

Technical Collaboration

• Partner closely with application engineers to ensure platform constraints and capabilities are well understood
• Implement infrastructure changes hands-on, working independently and alongside other engineers
• Contribute to standards and best practices for infrastructure, deployment, and operations as the team grows
• Share knowledge with other engineers and contribute to improving the overall operational maturity of the organization

Minimum Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience building and operating production infrastructure in cloud environments
• Hands-on experience with AWS core services (EC2, ECS/EKS, VPC, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, ALB/NLB, CloudWatch, etc.)
• Understanding of containerized workloads and orchestration concepts
• Experience supporting systems designed for high availability, fault tolerance, and controlled failure
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent)
• Experience contributing to infrastructure migrations and production changes
• Experience debugging production incidents involving networking, scaling, or service degradation

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating infrastructure for financial systems or other high-reliability domains
• Experience working with infrastructure through periods of growth or increasing complexity
• Familiarity with observability and strong operational practices
• Experience simplifying, retiring, or rearchitecting existing infrastructure
• Comfort working closely with a Rails-based application stack while remaining tool-agnostic