Senior Platform Engineer & Systems Architect

Wag Walking; Columbus (OH); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Wag! Group Co. is seeking a senior platform engineer to drive the core platform, infrastructure, and developer tooling behind our products. You will design and implement core systems, define the platform roadmap, and collaborate with engineering teams to ensure a secure, reliable, and scalable foundation.

You will report to the CTO and shape architectural direction across PHP, Python, and mobile/web platforms, taking ownership of the overall platform vision and execution.

Qualifications

• Willingness to roll up your sleeves and move from planning to execution with a small team.
• Significant backend software development experience.
• Familiarity with PHP and Python.
• Strong experience with containerization and CI/CD pipeline design.
• Expertise designing and maintaining cloud infrastructure; ideally in AWS.
• Proficiency with Terraform for managing infrastructure.
• Strong experience with cross‑team initiatives and influencing technical direction.
• Solid understanding of reliability engineering, monitoring, and incident management.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work with multiple engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement complex and critical backend systems such as payment processing and authentication in the Wag core backend.
• Design cross‑platform and cross‑team system architecture.
• Build and deploy pipelines, containerization (Docker, GitLab CI/CD), and developer tooling to boost productivity.
• Incorporate AI powered solutions to support platform quality and developer productivity.
• Define and maintain the platform roadmap balancing reliability, productivity, debt, and cost.
• Design bug detection and triage tooling and procedures.
• Contribute infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Design and drive incident response procedures including observability and on‑call tooling.
• Serve as a trusted technical owner for key backend systems.
• Mentor engineers on infrastructure and platform best practices.
• Ensure security and compliance in platform design in partnership with Security Manager.
• Own data engineering and analytics platform design.
• Participate in on‑call incident response for key systems.

Skills

Backend development

PHP

Python

Docker

CI/CD pipelines

AWS

Terraform

Observability

Incident management

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

GitLab CI/CD

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Wag! Group Co. is seeking a senior platform engineer to drive the core platform, infrastructure, and developer tooling behind our products. You will design and implement core systems, define the platform roadmap, and collaborate with engineering teams to ensure a secure, reliable, and scalable foundation.

You will report to the CTO and shape architectural direction across PHP, Python, and mobile/web platforms, taking ownership of the overall platform vision and execution.