Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 307,000 - 352,000; Full time

Job summary

Kikoff is seeking a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to own high-leverage infrastructure problems from design through production. You will build internal products and paved paths, improving delivery speed, reliability, and cost efficiency while reducing operational toil for Kikoff engineers.

This hands‑on role requires leading incidents, writing code, and shaping a platform that scales with fintech growth and AI-powered changes across systems.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience or equivalent Staff-level impact.
• Production ownership of a production system with incidents handled and improvements made.
• Proficient coding in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby or similar languages for production software.
• Experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and security boundaries.
• Strong generalist judgment with depth in at least one infra domain and ability to learn across adjacent areas.
• Track record building platform capabilities adopted by engineers because they solve real problems.
• Clear, direct communication to explain decisions, evidence, and tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Own and design critical platform systems from concept to production operation.
• Run infrastructure as a product with self-service tools and automation.
• Set technical direction and tradeoffs for delivery speed, reliability, security, and cost.
• Raise the engineering bar by reviewing designs, guiding decisions, and creating durable documentation.

Skills

TypeScript

Python

Go

Ruby

AWS

CI/CD

Observability

Security practices

Tools

Pulumi

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

Job description

Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money. We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.

Why Kikoff:

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

About the Role

Kikoff's infrastructure team builds the systems that enable engineering teams to move quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost discipline. The team owns five connected areas: Observability, Developer Productivity, Compute Infrastructure, Networking and Storage, and Data Infrastructure.

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own high-leverage infrastructure problems from design through production operation and help run infrastructure as a product for Kikoff engineers. You will build internal products and paved paths that turn ambiguous problems into durable systems. Your work should improve delivery speed and reliability, reduce cost, and reduce the amount of operational work product teams carry.

This is a hands-on Staff IC role. You will foster relationships, write code, review designs, make architecture decisions, lead through incidents, and help engineers solve problems outside the runbook. You will have a primary area of depth and enough range to follow production problems across infrastructure boundaries.

AI is increasing the amount of code and change moving through our systems. You will help build a platform that can absorb that growth without creating more incidents, unsustainable cost, or a team that depends on heroics.

In This Role, You Will

Build and Own Critical Platform Systems

• Design and implement self-service infrastructure on AWS using reusable code and infrastructure-as-code patterns. We use Pulumi, HCL, and TypeScript heavily. The company runs on Ruby.
• Own the systems you build in production, including reliability, security, capacity, cost, upgrades, incidents, and recovery.
• Give critical services an SLO, actionable alerts, a useful dashboard, a runbook, and a tested recovery path.
• Automate recurring operational work and eliminate failure-prone manual steps rather than allowing them to become permanent processes.

Run Infrastructure as a Product

• Work directly with engineers to turn recurring friction into paved paths, self-service tools, and automated workflows that are faster and safer than one-off solutions.
• Measure outcomes for internal customers through adoption, developer feedback, delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load.
• Use the fastest responsible path when a team is blocked, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability.

Set Technical Direction

• Set technical direction for ambiguous infrastructure work, then carry it from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and production ownership.
• Make clear trade-offs among delivery speed, reliability, security, cost, and long-term operational complexity.
• Partner across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Product Engineering to build security and compliance controls into normal engineering workflows.

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Review code and designs, challenge weak assumptions, help other engineers make better technical decisions, and uphold high standards for reliability, testing, safe deployments, security, and maintainability.
• Lead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and ensure the system is better after service is restored.
• Create standards, reusable patterns, and durable documentation that improve how teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software.

You Have

• 7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of Staff-level technical impact.
• Sustained ownership of a consequential production system. You have operated what you built, handled incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and improved the system afterward.
• Strong coding skills in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, or a similar language. You can build production software, not only configure tools.
• Production experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and the security boundaries around them.
• Experienced generalist judgment. You have depth in at least one infrastructure domain and can learn quickly across adjacent ones.
• A track record of building platform capabilities that engineers adopted because they solved real problems and were easier to use than one‑off alternatives.
• Clear, direct communication. You can explain a technical decision, its evidence, and its tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners.

Nice to Have

• Deep experience in one or more of observability, developer productivity, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, or security.
• Experience with Pulumi and TypeScript on AWS, including ECS or Fargate, k8s, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, and IAM.
• Experience building and operating an early‑stage platform through rapid growth in fintech or another regulated environment.

What We're Like

Scrappy. We move quickly and build what we need. We do not cut corners when they matter, and we do not over-engineer when they do not.

Risk-oriented. We make tradeoffs deliberately. A mature team knows the difference between a risk worth taking and one that is not.

Data-obsessed. We look at the data, understand the mechanics behind it, and use that evidence to make better decisions.

Humble. We know the company has benefited from timing, circumstance, and the right people showing up. We are grateful, and we do not take it for granted.

Base Range

$307,000—$352,000 USD

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

Please reference the following for more information.