Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Sezzle; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Benefit Plans

Generous Parental & Family Leave

Competitive 401k Match

Paid Time Off & Volunteer Time Off

Ownership Through Equity

Remote Friendly Company

Discounted Fitness Membership

Job summary

Sezzle is seeking a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, operate, and scale the platform that powers Sezzle. You will own architecture, drive reliability, and reduce cost while delivering high throughput and low latency.

The role connects AWS, Kubernetes, and Aurora RDS with IaC, instrumentation, and AI-assisted tooling, and includes on-call ownership and postmortems to improve production readiness and resilience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of experience designing and operating production infrastructure at scale.
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production and with AWS.
• Strong coding and automation skills with Golang, Python, or similar languages.
• Experience with incident response, disaster recovery, and postmortems.
• Experience building AI-assisted incident investigation or operational automation.
• Proven ability to reduce toil through platform tooling and self-service capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and evolution of core infrastructure.
• Lead design, prototyping, and implementation of scalable, reliable systems.
• Manage on-call rotations and drive incident recovery with evidence-based triage.

Skills

Kubernetes

AWS

Linux

Networking

Databases

Python

Go

Terraform

Incident response

Automation

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Aurora RDS

PostgreSQL

Git

GitLab

Terraform

Job description

• We are seeking an exceptional Principal Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, operate, and scale the platform that powers Sezzle. Your focus will be the hardest infrastructure problems: increasing throughput, reducing latency, removing capacity bottlenecks, strengthening resilience, and making production operations more automated and predictable as the business grows
• You will own complex technical initiatives from architecture and prototyping through implementation, production rollout, and ongoing operation. Your impact will come from the systems you build, the problems you solve, and measurable improvements in reliability, performance, and cost efficiency
• Our stack runs on AWS, with workloads orchestrated on Kubernetes and data anchored in Aurora RDS (MySQL and Postgres). You should know these technologies deeply and be comfortable moving between cloud architecture, networking, cluster internals, database performance, and application behavior to understand how the entire system scales. You will write code and infrastructure-as-code, debug production systems, and deliver changes that hold up under real traffic and failure conditions
• Operational ownership is part of the job. You will participate in the on-call rotation and take a hands‑on role in recovering from major incidents, including full outages. We need someone who can form and test hypotheses using logs, metrics, and traces, make sound mitigation decisions with incomplete information, and turn incident findings into lasting engineering fixes
• You will also build and apply AI‑assisted infrastructure and SRE tooling for incident investigation, capacity analysis, runbook automation, and toil reduction. You will evaluate these tools through practical results and apply appropriate access controls, validation, and auditability to their use in production
• This role reports to engineering leadership and works closely with application engineers, Security, and Compliance. You will develop a deep understanding of how Sezzle’s business operates and how customer journeys, transaction patterns, and product decisions shape infrastructure demand and behavior
• You will use that understanding to identify and deliver improvements across teams and technical domains, connecting infrastructure decisions to better customer outcomes and business performance
• Own the technical architecture and evolution of core infrastructure: identify system limits, prioritize technical improvements, and implement changes that support increasing traffic, data volume, and workload complexity
• Connect business understanding to improvements across the system: learn how key business workflows behave in production, trace their impact across applications, data, and infrastructure, and partner across teams to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency beyond any single service or team’s scope
• Engineer for scale and performance: build capacity models, run load and stress tests, diagnose bottlenecks across compute, networking, Kubernetes, and databases, and validate improvements against throughput, latency, saturation, and cost per workload
• Design and build AWS infrastructure: implement resilient account, IAM, network, and service architectures; address service quotas, fault isolation, and multi‑AZ or multi‑region requirements as workloads grow
• Build and operate the Kubernetes platform: improve cluster architecture, lifecycle automation, workload isolation, resource allocation, autoscaling, safe upgrades, and deployment reliability
• Scale and optimize Aurora RDS for MySQL and Postgres: tune queries and indexes, address connection and replication bottlenecks, plan capacity, improve failover behavior, and implement safe schema changes and database migrations with application engineers
• Improve reliability through engineering: define and instrument service-level objectives and error budgets with service owners; implement failure isolation, backpressure, load shedding, and safe retry behavior where needed to prevent cascading failures
• Participate in on‑call and drive technical recovery during serious incidents: use evidence‑based triage, execute mitigations, communicate findings, and implement corrective actions from postmortems
• Implement and test disaster recovery: design backup, restore, and failover mechanisms against agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives; run recovery exercises and document measured results
• Build infrastructure‑as‑code and operational automation: make provisioning, configuration, deployments, upgrades, and recovery reproducible, reviewed, testable, and recoverable. Eliminate recurring manual work through code
• Build observability that makes production diagnosable: improve metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts, with visibility into service health, scaling limits, and customer impact
• Deliver safe infrastructure migrations: design phased rollouts, compatibility checks, validation, and rollback paths for changes to shared production systems
• Improve cloud cost efficiency through technical changes: right‑size resources, improve utilization, tune autoscaling and storage, and quantify savings while maintaining reliability and performance targets
• Build and evaluate AI‑assisted operational tooling: apply AI to investigation, runbooks, anomaly analysis, and repetitive operations, with bounded permissions, reviewable actions, and measurable improvements in accuracy or toil
• Make technical decisions clear and executable: write architecture proposals, evaluate technology tradeoffs through prototypes and benchmarks, review changes affecting shared infrastructure, and document how systems operate and fail
• Sezzle’s Technology Stack:
• Languages: Golang, Python
• Database: MySQL, Postgres
• DevOps and Cloud: AWS, Kubernetes
• Version Control: Git
• CI/CD: Gitlab
• Open Source: Sezzle is focused on using open source, and we build what we can before buying!

Benefits

• Comprehensive Benefit Plans
• Generous Parental & Family Leave
• Competitive 401k Match
• Paid Time Off & Volunteer Time Off
• Ownership Through Equity
• 100% of Donations to Charity Matched
• Remote Friendly Company
• Highly Discounted Fitness Membership

A track record of personally delivering infrastructure scaling improvements: identifying constraints, measuring baseline behavior, implementing changes, and demonstrating gains in capacity, latency, reliability, or cost efficiencyWillingness to participate in an on-call rotation and demonstrated ability to recover production systems under pressure using evidence-based triage, safe mitigation, and clear technical communicationExperience implementing and testing disaster recovery against defined recovery objectives, including restoring data and validating service recoveryActive use of AI tooling in engineering or operations, with practical judgment about its limitations and how to verify generated code, recommendations, and operational actionsPractical experience with observability, load testing, capacity planning, and safe CI/CD practices for shared production infrastructureYou go deep: you investigate how systems behave under load and failure, follow the evidence, and fix underlying causesYou value simplicity: you choose systems that are understandable, operable, and reduce unnecessary complexityYou earn trust – you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfullyStrong systems fundamentals: Linux, networking, DNS, TLS, storage, concurrency, and distributed system failure modes, with the ability to debug problems across infrastructure and application boundariesBachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a similar technical field (required)Strong coding and automation skills, using Golang, Python, or similar languages to build production tooling and eliminate operational toil, alongside infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform or equivalentExperience operating a 24/7, high-availability platform where downtime has direct customer or revenue impact, including hands‑on incident response and postmortem remediationYou stay accountable for the outcome: you verify that changes work in production and fixes remain effective as the platform scalesYou have backbone; disagree, then commit – you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, have conviction and is tenacious, but once decisions are made, you commit whollyYou’re not bound by convention – your success lies in developing new ways to do thingsYou have relentlessly high standards – continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixedYou need action – you value calculated risk-taking and understand that speed matters in businessYou build and ship: you turn architecture into working code, tested infrastructure, and safe production changesYou measure results: you can explain the impact of your work in availability, latency, capacity, recovery time, cost, or hours of toil removedDeep expertise with Kubernetes in production: cluster lifecycle, scheduling, resource management, autoscaling, networking, and troubleshooting business-critical workloads. EKS experience is strongly preferredAbility to carry ambiguous technical problems from investigation through production delivery and collaborate across engineering disciplines to resolve system-wide constraints12+ years of experience across infrastructure, platform, site reliability, software development, or related engineering disciplines, with substantial hands-on depth designing and operating production infrastructure at scaleDeep expertise with AWS: production experience across compute, IAM, multi-account architectures, and networking, including VPC design and private connectivityDeep expertise with relational databases at scale, specifically RDS/Aurora (MySQL and/or Postgres): query performance, indexing, connection management, replication, high availability, failover, and verified backup and recoveryYou deliver results – you focus on key inputs, deliver quality work on time, and persist despite setbacksProficiency with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or comparable observability systemsExperience building internal platform capabilities and self-service tooling, including deployment automation, progressive delivery, and reusable infrastructure componentsExperience in fintech, payments, or banking, operating infrastructure with demanding reliability, security, and audit requirementsExperience building AI-assisted incident investigation or operational automation with restricted access, auditable execution, and clear human review pointsExperience with multi-region architectures, chaos engineering, and failure testing, including the consistency and recovery tradeoffs of distributed data systems