Sr. Backend Engineer

Fuel Talent LLC; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Fuel Talent LLC in Seattle, WA is seeking a Sr. Backend Engineer to join a highly technical, hands-on team building an AI-powered platform. You will own cloud infrastructure, security, and observability, ensuring end-to-end reliability and scalability across environments.

The role emphasizes infrastructure as code, Kubernetes on AWS, Helm charts, CI/CD pipelines, and ongoing compliance initiatives, with a focus on security and efficiency.

Qualifications

• Experience designing reusable Terraform modules for multi-environment deployments.
• Production Kubernetes on AWS (EKS) with RDS/PostgreSQL, Redis, S3 and IAM.
• Hands-on security/compliance for SOC 2/ISO 27001 programs.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Own Kubernetes platform architecture and deployment tooling.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment reliability.
• Lead security, compliance, and audit tasks with auditors.
• Enhance observability with monitoring and incident response.

Skills

Terraform

Kubernetes

AWS

Helm

Istio

HashiCorp Vault

Prometheus

Grafana

Bash

Python

RDS/PostgreSQL

Redis

S3

IAM

KMS

Route53

Load Balancers

Container Registry

SOC 2 / ISO 27001

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes (AWS EKS)

Helm charts

Istio

Vault

Prometheus

Grafana

CloudWatch

Job description

# Sr. Backend EngineerApplyApplyPosted 6 days agoShareFull TimeSeattle, Washington$200,000 - $225,000 Annually## About the RoleWe're building an AI-powered software platform and are looking for a Staff Engineer with deep experience in backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and security/compliance.We're looking for someone who enjoys understanding systems end-to-end and takes ownership of how a platform is built, deployed, secured, monitored, and audited.This is a highly technical, hands-on engineering role—not a people management position. You'll help define technical direction across our cloud infrastructure, build infrastructure as code, improve platform reliability, and own key security and compliance initiatives.Our environment is cloud-native and infrastructure-as-code driven, supporting modern distributed applications and AI-powered services.---## What You'll Work On### Cloud Infrastructure & Infrastructure as Code* Design reusable Terraform modules and infrastructure for multiple environments (production, staging, development).* Build and manage cloud infrastructure including compute, networking, storage, databases, and identity management.### Kubernetes Platform* Own Kubernetes infrastructure and deployment architecture.* Maintain Helm charts and deployment tooling for multiple production services.* Improve developer experience for local development and production environments.### CI/CD* Design and maintain modern CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.* Improve deployment automation, reliability, and release processes.### Security & Platform Hardening* Implement secure infrastructure practices including encryption, IAM, secrets management, TLS, network segmentation, and policy enforcement.* Continuously improve the organization's overall security posture.### Observability & Reliability* Build monitoring, alerting, logging, and incident response capabilities.* Create dashboards, runbooks, backup strategies, and disaster recovery plans.* Improve platform reliability and operational excellence.### Compliance* Serve as the technical lead for security and compliance initiatives such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar frameworks.* Partner with auditors and internal stakeholders to implement controls and maintain compliance.### Cost & Scalability* Optimize infrastructure utilization through autoscaling, performance tuning, and cloud cost management.---## What We're Looking For### Core Technical Experience* Strong Terraform experience designing reusable modules and multi-environment infrastructure.* Production Kubernetes experience, preferably on AWS EKS or comparable managed Kubernetes platforms.* Strong AWS experience including services such as: + Kubernetes + RDS/PostgreSQL + Redis + S3 + IAM + KMS + Route53 + Load Balancers + Container Registry + Security and monitoring services* Experience authoring and maintaining Helm charts.* Service mesh experience (Istio or similar).* Experience with certificate management and TLS.* Secrets management experience (HashiCorp Vault or similar).* Monitoring and observability experience using Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, CloudWatch, or similar platforms.* Strong scripting skills in Bash and Python.### Security & Compliance* Hands-on experience supporting SOC 2, ISO 27001, or comparable compliance programs.* Experience implementing engineering controls, audit evidence collection, and security best practices.* Familiarity with vulnerability management, software supply chain security, container scanning, encryption, network segmentation, and least-privilege IAM.* Experience with compliance automation platforms is a plus.---## Nice to Have* Experience operating AI or LLM infrastructure.* Familiarity with inference platforms, model routing, and AI platform architecture.* Experience building usage-based or metered billing systems.* Experience with private networking solutions such as Tailscale or similar technologies.* Kubernetes migration experience.* Experience integrating modern error tracking and application monitoring platforms.---## What Makes You a Great FitYou think holistically about distributed systems while still enjoying diving deep into technical details. You make thoughtful architectural decisions, improve reliability and security across the platform, and turn operational challenges into scalable engineering solutions.You document your work well, remain calm during production incidents, and continuously improve systems to prevent future issues.