Senior Platform Engineer

Next Ventures; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Next Ventures is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Platform Engineering to own critical systems, improving correctness, reliability, and performance under load. You will work across transactional systems, databases, observability, and infrastructure, debugging complex production issues and designing durable solutions.

You will collaborate with product and engineering teams to establish scalable architectural patterns, drive AI-assisted development, and set technical standards across the

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong experience with TypeScript and Node.js, including full-stack development.
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization and operating under load.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including idempotency and retries.
• Experience owning production observability using Datadog or OpenTelemetry.
• Ability to establish technical patterns and architectural decisions across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve critical transactional systems with emphasis on correctness, reliability, and performance under high load.
• Drive reliability across third-party integrations, with robust retry and reconciliation workflows.
• Lead and improve the observability strategy with monitoring, tracing, and production metrics.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in a large PostgreSQL environment.
• Establish architectural patterns for high-write transactional workloads and distributed apps.
• Investigate production incidents from symptoms to durable solutions and implement fixes.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to deliver scalable platform capabilities.

Skills

TypeScript and Node.js

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Observability

Problem-solving

Ownership in fast-moving environments

Architectural patterns

AI-assisted development

Tools

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Senior Software Engineer – Platform Engineering

About the Company

We are a fast-growing technology company building a comprehensive software platform that powers critical business operations for a growing customer base.

The platform brings together transactional systems, payments, data, integrations, analytics, and AI-powered capabilities into a unified experience. The engineering team moves quickly, ships frequently, and works closely with customers to continuously improve the product.

AI-assisted engineering is an important part of the development culture, with modern AI coding tools being used to improve productivity, accelerate development, and solve complex technical problems.

About the Team

The Platform Engineering team owns the technical foundation that supports the broader product. This includes architecture, observability, transactional systems, databases, and core infrastructure.

The team is small, highly technical, and operates with significant ownership. Its work directly impacts the reliability, performance, and scalability of the entire platform while establishing engineering patterns and standards used across the organization.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering team, you\'ll take ownership of highly critical systems where correctness, reliability, and performance are essential.

You\'ll work across transactional systems, integrations, databases, observability, and infrastructure. You\'ll investigate complex production issues, identify root causes, and design solutions that prevent entire classes of problems from recurring.

You\'ll also partner closely with other engineering and product teams to establish scalable architectural patterns and technical standards across the organization.

In This Role, You Will

• Own and improve critical transactional systems, including idempotency, race-condition prevention, transactional integrity, and graceful degradation under high system load.

• Drive reliability across third-party integrations and transaction-processing systems, including retries, recovery workflows, and reconciliation.

• Lead and improve the organization\'s observability strategy, including application performance monitoring, real-user monitoring, database monitoring, structured logging, distributed tracing, and production metrics.

• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across a large PostgreSQL environment, including query optimization, indexing, read replicas, N+1 query elimination, and caching.

• Establish architectural patterns for high-write transactional workloads, resilient systems, and distributed applications, and drive adoption across engineering teams.

• Investigate production incidents from initial symptoms through root cause and implement durable solutions rather than temporary fixes.

• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to design and deliver scalable platform capabilities.

• Multiply your engineering output through the thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools, including reviewing, directing, and productionizing AI-generated code.

Your Background

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.

• Strong experience with TypeScript and Node.js, including full-stack application development.

• Deep experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization, indexing, database performance, and operating databases under significant load.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including idempotency, transactional boundaries, race conditions, retries, and failure handling.

• Experience owning or significantly contributing to production observability, using Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or comparable technologies.

• Strong problem-solving skills with a focus on identifying root causes and building solutions that prevent recurring issues.

• Experience working with a high degree of ownership in a small or fast-moving engineering environment.

• Ability to establish technical patterns and make architectural decisions that can be adopted across teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with payments, transaction processing, financial systems, or other high-reliability transactional platforms.

• Experience with retail technology, point-of-sale systems, inventory platforms, or other operational software.

• Familiarity with technologies such as Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, ElastiCache, Aurora/RDS, RDS Proxy, PostgreSQL, or pgvector.

• Experience working with AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or Devin.

• Experience establishing technical standards, architectural principles, or engineering best practices across teams.

• Experience building or integrating LLM-powered product features, including AI agents, computer vision, recommendations, or intelligent automation.