Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure engineering, with deep, production-proven expertise in AWS
• Track record of owning and driving infrastructure initiatives end-to-end — from design and architecture through implementation, rollout, and operational excellence
• Expert-level proficiency with Terraform, including module design, state management strategies, and establishing IaC standards for engineering teams
• Extensive production experience operating Kubernetes (EKS strongly preferred) at scale — cluster lifecycle management, multi-tenancy patterns, Helm governance, and GitOps workflows
• Strong Linux systems engineering skills and advanced scripting proficiency (Python, Bash, or Go)
• Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins) with experience designing deployment strategies for multi-service architectures
• Expert-level understanding of cloud networking (VPC architecture, Transit Gateway, peering, DNS, load balancing) and security (IAM, KMS, WAF, GuardDuty, Secrets Manager)
• Proven experience designing and operating observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenSearch/ELK) at organizational scale
• Strong experience with database infrastructure and data layer architecture (Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS, ElastiCache/Redis, OpenSearch, DynamoDB)
• Demonstrated ability to lead disaster recovery planning, execute DR simulations, and design HA architecture patterns for mission-critical systems
• Excellent technical communication skills — ability to write clear ADRs, present to leadership, and translate infrastructure complexity for non-technical stakeholders
• Proven track record of mentoring engineers and elevating team capabilities through knowledge sharing, design reviews, and tooling improvements
• 7+ years of infrastructure or platform engineering experience, including 5+ years operating at a senior or staff level
• Experience in financial services, fintech, broker-dealer, or other heavily regulated industries with FINRA/SEC compliance requirements
• AWS certifications at the Professional or Specialty level: Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, Security Specialty, or Machine Learning Specialty
• Experience with event streaming platforms at scale (Amazon MSK / Apache Kafka) including cluster operations, partition strategy, and consumer group management
• Hands-on experience with API gateway management and platform design (Kong, AWS API Gateway)
• Demonstrated experience with AI/ML infrastructure: provisioning GPU compute, SageMaker/Bedrock integration, vector databases, MLOps pipelines, or AIOps automation in production
• Experience defining and executing organizational rollout strategies for AI developer tools, including governance frameworks, usage analytics, and cost management
• Proficiency with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA/Rego, Sentinel, Kyverno) for infrastructure governance and compliance automation
• FinOps certification or demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization programs at scale
• Experience authoring RFCs, ADRs, or technical strategy documents that influenced engineering-wide decisions
• Contributions to open-source projects, conference talks, or published technical writing
• Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification

What the job involves

• We're hiring a Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to join the Cloud Infrastructure & Platform (CIN) team at Altruist
• This is a high-impact, team lead role responsible for architecting, building, and operating the AWS-based infrastructure that powers our broker-dealer and clearing platform
• You will own critical infrastructure domains end-to-end and drive technical decisions that affect the reliability, security, and scalability of systems handling real financial transactions
• As the industry evolves rapidly with generative AI and agentic workflows, we need an AI-forward engineer who combine deep AWS and Kubernetes expertise with the vision and initiative to define how AI/ML tools and patterns can transform infrastructure operations, developer productivity, and platform resilience
• This role carries significant technical influence — you will shape infrastructure strategy, lead complex cross-functional initiatives, and raise the bar for engineering practices across the organization
• This is not a ticket-driven infrastructure role. At the Staff level, we expect you to:
• Own domains, not just tasks. You will be the technical authority for critical infrastructure areas (e.g., EKS platform, observability strategy, DR architecture, or AI infrastructure) and drive their roadmap
• Define technical direction. Author architectural decision records (ADRs), propose infrastructure standards, and influence engineering-wide technology choices through design reviews and RFCs
• Lead by action. Drive cross-team initiatives, align stakeholders, unblock other engineers, and represent infrastructure perspectives in leadership discussions and planning
• Multiply the team. Elevate the entire CIN team through mentorship, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and building reusable frameworks and golden paths that scale beyond your individual output
• Bridge infrastructure and business. Translate complex technical trade-offs into clear recommendations for engineering leadership, product teams, and compliance stakeholders
• Cloud Infrastructure Architecture & Platform Engineering
• Architect, deploy, and operate production AWS infrastructure supporting high-availability financial services workloads (EKS, MSK, RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, and more)
• Own and evolve the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy using Terraform — define module standards, enforce code review practices, and drive adoption of reusable patterns across teams
• Lead Kubernetes (EKS) platform strategy, including cluster upgrades, node group architecture, Helm chart governance, service mesh evolution, and workload autoscaling policies
• Design and drive CI/CD platform improvements (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar) to enable safe, fast, and self-service deployments for application engineering teams
• Architect and validate disaster recovery (DR) strategies, including cross-region failover designs, backup automation, and leading DR simulation exercises
• Lead infrastructure design reviews and architectural discussions; ensure solutions meet scalability, security, and compliance requirements before implementation
• Reliability, Observability & Operational Excellence
• Define and drive the observability strategy across the platform (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenSearch) — including SLO/SLI frameworks, alerting standards, and distributed tracing
• Serve as a senior on-call escalation point; lead root-cause analysis on critical production incidents and drive systemic improvements through blameless post-mortems
• Own monthly resource saturation reviews and capacity planning processes; proactively identify scaling needs and present findings to engineering leadership
• Drive cloud cost optimization strategy: FinOps practices, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans analysis, vendor spend governance, and accountability frameworks across teams
• Security, Compliance & Networking
• Define and enforce security architecture standards across AWS environments: IAM policy governance, VPC design patterns, encryption strategies, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and vulnerability remediation workflows
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Audit teams to ensure infrastructure meets FINRA, SEC, SOC 2, and other regulatory requirements — and proactively identify gaps before they become findings
• Own networking architecture decisions including VPC topology, Transit Gateway strategy, VPN configurations, load balancer patterns (ALB/NLB), CDN optimization (Fastly/CloudFront), and DNS management
• AI/ML Infrastructure & Developer Productivity
• Define the strategy for evaluating, integrating, and governing AI-powered developer tools (e.g., Cursor AI, GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit) across the engineering organization — including usage analytics, cost optimization, security review, and policy frameworks
• Architect infrastructure for AI/ML workloads: GPU-enabled compute, SageMaker endpoints, Bedrock integration, vector databases, and data pipeline orchestration
• Lead the adoption of AI-driven automation for infrastructure operations — intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, auto-remediation, and AIOps patterns — moving from exploration to production integration
• Build and champion internal platforms and golden paths that leverage generative AI to improve developer experience, reduce operational toil, and accelerate delivery velocity
• Technical Leadership & Collaboration
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to the Director of Engineering and engineering leadership on infrastructure strategy, trade-offs, and investment priorities
• Lead cross-functional initiatives spanning application engineering, data, security, and DevSecOps teams — driving alignment on complex multi-team infrastructure projects
• Represent the CIN team in architecture review boards, incident response leadership, and engineering-wide planning sessions
• Author and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, ADRs, and operational procedures that serve as organizational knowledge assets
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; conduct thorough design and code reviews; actively contribute to hiring and onboarding processes for the CIN team

Benefits

• Grow your career: Altruist is a thoughtful, fast-growing company that values high achievers
• Our success is your success: Be rewarded for doing great work - competitive compensation and equity for all team members
• Take care of yourself: Health, dental, and vision coverage, available on your first day
• Work-life integration: We work hard and respect everyone’s whole selves
• You're welcome here: Altruist is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to inclusivity