Platform Engineer

Job Title: Platform Engineer Reports to: Director of Engineering About the role: 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 helps ensure 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 Qualification • 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 Some Of Our Benefits: • Generous PTO and company holiday policy + company paid Short Term Disability • 100% employer covered health and dental insurance for our direct employees (a set plan is covered, with higher tier healthcare coverage available at employee’s additional cost; dependent coverage is at employee’s cost); vision plan available at employee’s additional cost • Child Care Benefits and generous parental leave Salary: • $150,000 - $170,000, DOE + Benefits Who we are: inKind connects passionate diners with exceptional restaurants across the country. inKind partners with thousands of restaurants and has millions of users who want to discover great places, dine confidently, and earn meaningful rewards. Through the inKind app, guests earn 20% back every time they dine, turning everyday meals into something more rewarding. From celebrated restaurant groups like José Andres and Michael Mina to beloved neighborhood favorites, inKind helps diners explore the best restaurants in town while supporting the restaurants and chefs who shape how their cities eat. Rooted in hospitality and built on a win-win philosophy, inKind exists to help great restaurants thrive while inspiring guests to dine out more often. Every meal creates value on both sides of the table, empowering diners to savor more while strengthening the restaurant community. Who we are: inKind connects passionate diners with exceptional restaurants across the country. inKind partners with thousands of restaurants and has millions of users who want to discover great places, dine confidently, and earn meaningful rewards. Through the inKind app, guests earn 20% back every time they dine, turning everyday meals into something more rewarding. From celebrated restaurant groups like José Andres and Michael Mina to beloved neighborhood favorites, inKind helps diners explore the best restaurants in town while supporting the restaurants and chefs who shape how their cities eat. Rooted in hospitality and built on a win-win philosophy, inKind exists to help great restaurants thrive while inspiring guests to dine out more often. Every meal creates value on both sides of the table, empowering diners to savor more while strengthening the restaurant community. inKind is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that diversity is vital to inKind's ability to provide our clients with the best recommendations and are committed to fostering a varied and inclusive work environment. Your race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability status, veteran status, or any other protected category have no bearing on our hiring decisions. By submitting this application, you acknowledge that inKind Cards, Inc. may share the information you provide with trusted third-party service providers, including fraud detection and application processing partners, to evaluate your application and ensure the integrity of our hiring process. Your information will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. For California residents and others with applicable rights, please review our privacy notice for information about your rights regarding your personal data.