Platform Engineer: Scalable Backend & Observability

Bain & Company; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 78,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Bain & Company in Chicago seeks a Platform Engineer to join the PEG Innovation team. You will contribute to backend services for the Bain Diligence Platform, building reliable APIs, schemas, and storage patterns while collaborating with security, data, and infrastructure partners.

You’ll own code from design through deployment, write tests and runbooks, and participate in on-call rotations. A strong focus on security-by-default, observability, and scalable platforms will help you thrive in

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 2+ years of experience building backend services, APIs, or platform components in a production or near-production environment.
• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining backend services or APIs with an emphasis on reliability and correctness.
• Experience contributing to REST APIs and working with relational databases (Postgres preferred), including basic schema evolution and migration workflows.
• Exposure to containerised development and deployment practices (Docker) and familiarity with operating services in Kubernetes environments (Azure / AKS in practice).
• Exposure to authentication and authorisation concepts (JWT, RBAC, OIDC/SAML — Entra ID / Azure AD in practice) and interest in building secure-by-default services.
• Demonstrated ability to learn from feedback, collaborate effectively, and deliver production-ready work within established engineering standards.
• Proficient Python development skills; able to build FastAPI services using Pydantic, write tests with pytest, and follow linting/type-checking standards (Ruff, mypy), and manage environments and dependencies with uv.
• Working knowledge of Postgres fundamentals: schema design basics, indexing concepts, and safe migration practices with Alembic.
• Working knowledge of Redis patterns for caching and session storage; understands basic failure modes and operational considerations.
• Familiarity with event-driven integration patterns applied where asynchronous behaviour adds value (change feeds / domain events, consumers, retries, idempotency); able to implement producers/consumers within established conventions.
• Docker proficiency for local development and building container images; understands non-root execution and basic image hygiene.
• Kubernetes fundamentals: understands deployments/services, pod lifecycle basics, and how health checks and resource limits affect service behaviour; able to work with Helm values and charts on AKS, including blue/green deployments.
• Observability fundamentals: structured logging, tracing concepts, and emitting metrics and APM traces via Datadog for service health; awareness of MLflow for evaluating AI features.
• Security fundamentals: understands least-privilege access, secret-handling basics, and common authN/authZ concepts; follows established patterns for JWT and RBAC integration, Entra ID, and Azure Key Vault.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and CI/CD via GitHub Actions; understands environment promotion, container registries (Cloudsmith), Helm chart versioning, and blue/green deployments on AKS.

Responsibilities

• Implement backend features and service endpoints under the guidance of senior engineers.
• Build REST APIs in FastAPI with clear contracts, input validation, and consistent error handling.
• Write and update Postgres schemas and Alembic migrations using safe patterns (including backwards-compatible changes) with review support.
• Use Redis for standard platform patterns such as caching, session storage, and rate limiting under established conventions.
• Use event-driven integration where asynchronous behaviour adds clear value (for example change feeds and domain events, following existing schema and envelope conventions), consistent with the platform's simple-now, evolve-when-needed approach.
• Add and maintain service instrumentation: structured logs, OpenTelemetry-style spans, and Datadog metrics and APM traces according to platform standards.
• Update and maintain Helm chart values and Kubernetes manifests for services deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS); ensure probes, resource requests/limits, and environment configuration are correct, and support blue/green candidate/promote deployments.
• Contribute to Terraform infrastructure-as-code for Azure, deployed through env0 / Terraform Cloud across dev, UAT, and prod environments, with review support.
• Work within GitHub Actions pipelines: pull-request test suites, branch-to-environment promotion (main → Dev, release/X.Y → UAT/Prod), image publishing to Cloudsmith, and blue/green candidate/promote deploys with approval gates.
• Triage and resolve routine production issues for owned services; participate in on-call rotation with support and follow established runbooks.
• Write and update runbooks and service documentation for changes you ship, ensuring operational steps remain accurate.

Skills

Backend development

APIs design

Python development

Docker & Kubernetes

REST APIs

Postgres databases

Observability & logging

Security fundamentals

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

Alembic

Redis

Azure AKS

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Cloudsmith

Job description

Bain & Company in Chicago seeks a Platform Engineer to join the PEG Innovation team. You will contribute to backend services for the Bain Diligence Platform, building reliable APIs, schemas, and storage patterns while collaborating with security, data, and infrastructure partners.

You’ll own code from design through deployment, write tests and runbooks, and participate in on-call rotations. A strong focus on security-by-default, observability, and scalable platforms will help you thrive in