Senior Software Engineer (Cloud Infrastructure)

Job Description

• We’re hiring a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to join the Cloud Infrastructure & Platform (CIN) team at Altruist

• This is a high-impact, senior individual contributor 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 engineers 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

Expectations for Senior-to-Staff Level

• 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 without a title
• 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
• You’re welcome here: Altruist is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to inclusivity
• Work-life integration: We work hard and respect everyone’s whole selves