Senior Platform Engineer

San Francisco

Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money. We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.

Why Kikoff:

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact. About the Role

You'll be one of our first platform engineers building the foundation for our fintech engineering organization as we scale from startup to enterprise-grade operations.

This is not a "keep the lights on" operations role. You'll build internal products - self-service tools and automated workflows that make secure, compliant infrastructure invisible to product teams. Your customers are engineers; your metrics are their velocity and our security posture.

In This Role, You Will

Build & Automate

Design self-service infrastructure using AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda, IAM) and Pulumi/TypeScript

Create automation that eliminates manual work

Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for fast, safe deployments

Enable & Scale

Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability systems

Build documentation and runbooks that empower teams to self-serve

Work with product teams to understand friction points

Improve & Secure

Balance fintech compliance requirements with developer experience

Participate in incident response and postmortems

Optimize system performance, scalability, and cost

Implement security controls that satisfy regulatory requirements

Collaborate

Treat platform as product: gather feedback, measure adoption, drive improvements

Partner with engineers and stakeholders to set technical strategy

Explain technical decisions clearly to non-technical audiences

Qualifications

5+ years infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineering

Production AWS (EC2, ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM)

Infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi or Terraform- we use Pulumi/TypeScript)

CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar)

Containers (Docker, ECS, or Kubernetes)

Monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, CloudWatch, or similar)

Strong coding skills in Ruby, Python, Go, TypeScript, or similar

Track record building platforms that teams actually adopted

Bonus points for:

Fintech or regulated industry experience (SOC 2, PCI-DSS)

Security automation or compliance tooling

0→1 infrastructure building experience

Data and ML infrastructure or MLOps background

Specialization Areas

During interviews, we'll discuss your focus area. All roles are 70% specialty, 30% general platform work.

Security & Compliance: Secure architectures, IAM systems, security automation, SOC 2/PCI-DSS frameworks, audit preparation

Site Reliability: Observability platforms, intelligent alerting, SLOs/error budgets, disaster recovery, performance optimization

Developer Experience: Self-service provisioning, CI/CD optimization, internal platforms, reusable infrastructure patterns Base Range $244,000 — $292,000 USD Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

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