Staff Software Engineer, Platform

United States·San Francisco,San FranciscoFull Timelead

DevOps & InfrastructureSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering

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Quick Summary

Overview

About Finch We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work. To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from…

Requirements Summary

You thrive in small teams with large scope and limited hand-holding. You're comfortable saying "not yet" to good ideas because you understand prioritization and opportunity cost.

Technical Tools

awsdatadoggithub-actionsgrafanakubernetespostgresqlprometheusredisterraformci-cdmentoringnetworkingtdd

About Finch

We are on a mission to revolutionize employment by building the infrastructure that powers every facet of work. To do this, we're looking for individuals who think about problems holistically and in-depth, who are relentlessly curious, self-starters, and determined to drive ideas from inception through to completion.

Finch is a Series B company backed by a fantastic set of firms, angels, and our developers including General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Homebrew, BoxGroup, YCombinator, Charley (1st business hire at Plaid), Sima (ex-Head of Biz Dev at Plaid), Henrique + Pedro (co-CEOs at Brex), Jeff + Wayne (co-CEOs at Digits), Immad (CEO at Mercury), Sam (CEO at Vouch Insurance), Karim (CTO at Ramp), and more.

About Our Team

We're a team of problem solvers who aren’t afraid to challenge assumptions. We value velocity, curiosity, empathy, and diverse perspectives. Everyone on the team is excited about the scope of the problems we address and the potential impact our work can have on the global workforce. We realize that the value we provide comes with great responsibilities, and therefore make security and privacy our highest priorities.

We come from a diverse set of backgrounds and each member brings different skills to the group. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and potential will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns.

About You

You thrive in small teams with large scope and limited hand-holding. You're comfortable saying "not yet" to good ideas because you understand prioritization and opportunity cost. You get energy from unblocking other engineers and improving their day-to-day experience. You're equally comfortable writing and reviewing code and explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders. You prefer high-impact infrastructure work over resume-driven development. You've mentored engineers before and genuinely enjoy helping others grow.

About The Role

Finch's Platform team owns the infrastructure and developer experience that powers our engineering organization. We're a 4-person team with a high-impact backlog spanning infrastructure stability, developer tooling, architectural decomposition, and security. We need a senior engineer to help prioritize this work, lead critical projects, and support the team. You'll have significant autonomy and immediate impact. There is a mix of greenfield work and high-leverage infrastructure improvements that enable the entire company to move faster and more reliably.

Live by and champion our values: #empathy, #execution, #humility, #curiosity.

Lead critical infrastructure projects and drive architectural decisions that will span across multiple teams ranging from problem definition/scoping to execution and see it through to successful and smooth delivery of impactful solutions

Establish platform engineering standards and partner with product teams on reliability, performance, and architecture

Be hands on in various parts of the system like AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, internal tooling and application layer.

Communicate platform priorities and trade-offs to engineering leadership and help them with building a prioritized roadmap.

Mentor other engineers who need technical guidance.

9+ years of backend/infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years in platform/SRE/DevOps roles.

Experience managing large backlogs and making prioritization trade-offs.

Proven ability to stabilize unreliable systems (CI, infrastructure, observability).

Mentorship experience—you'll guide engineers who need technical leadership.

Strong communication skills to advocate for platform needs and explain trade-offs.

Comfort with ambiguity and autonomy—you'll define what "good" looks like.

Ability to balance tech debt paydown with new feature delivery.

Experience working with NodeJS, PostgreSQL, and Redis, or similar, at scale

Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure, and networking

Strong knowledge of testing best practices. TDD is a bonus.

CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions or equivalent)

Experience working AWS Services and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred)

Kubernetes (deployments, scaling, troubleshooting, security)

Experience using a distributed messaging system.

Observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, etc.)

Competitive equity with a 10-year exercise window

Full medical, dental, and vision coverage (100% for employees, 85% for dependents)

Unlimited PTO (with a 3-week minimum)

401(k) plan

Regular team offsites and meetups

Hybrid work: 2+ days/week in our SF Office

Finch is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.