Staff Infrastructure Engineer

OpenKrill; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

VGS is building the foundational payments infrastructure at scale. As Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will lead design, scale, and fortification of global cloud infrastructure for mission-critical payments applications with zero downtime.

You will own core platform foundations, shaping architecture and reliability across designated domains. Join a high-agency team and drive modern SRE practices to accelerate velocity and trust.

Qualifications

• 7+ years delivering distributed systems in mission-critical settings.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and high availability.
• Technically strong in platform reliability and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, scale, and fortify global cloud infrastructure for payments apps.
• Drive architecture and reliability standards across domains.
• Own key platform foundations in a multi-region AWS environment.
• Move fast with high alignment via governance of Golden Paths.
• Partner with teams to enable platform adoption and impact.

Skills

Distributed systems

Ownermindset

High-availability

Code automation

Observability

Networking security

System reliability

Education

BA/BS degree

Tools

Kubernetes (EKS)

Docker

Terraform

GitOps (Flux, Argo)

GitHub Actions

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Java / Spring

Job description

About VGS

VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.

That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. We're helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people.

Trusted Engineering That Matters

Engineering at VGS

VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. We build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it.

Our Environment & Culture

• -Modern Tooling as Leverage: We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment.
• -Ownership of Outcomes: Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most.
• -Mission-Critical Accountability: We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead-we engineer them with first-class product discipline. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it's part of what customers buy.

Learn More: See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices.

About the Role

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader on our Platform Engineering team. You will design, scale, and fortify global cloud infrastructure designed to handle mission-critical, high-throughput payments applications with zero downtime.

You will take ownership of key platform foundations powering our core payments infrastructure. Rather than executing against a rigid task list, you will drive the execution, architecture, and reliability standards for your designated domains within our multi-region AWS environment. We are looking for high-agency engineers who want to own complex distributed system challenges end-to-end and elevate how the engineering team operates. If you thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems, building automated resiliency, and driving modern SRE practices, we want to build the future with you.

What You’ll Do

• -Build Immutable, Self-Healing Systems: Design, build, and optimize multi-region, high-availability AWS infrastructure. You will execute our evolution from hand-crafted environments to a standardized, globally scalable fleet managed entirely through code.
• -Drive Resiliency & Automation: Replace manual toil with self-healing, automated infrastructure using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and IaC.
• -Deep Observability & Resiliency: Implement end-to-end telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will drive incident management and conduct blameless post-mortems to continuously harden our reliability baseline.
• -Force-Multiply Engineering Velocity: Partner closely with Product, Security, and Core Engineering teams to implement "Golden Paths" that strip away friction for feature teams. You will influence engineering practices within your domain and mentor engineers on how to move fast with high alignment.
• -Customer Impact: Implement and operate high-performance, low-latency private connectivity to optimize the experience for external customers. Partner with internal engineering teams at the design level for platform enablement and adoption.

What You Bring

• -Ownership at Scale: 7+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments.
• -AWS & Infrastructure-as-Code: Strong proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments.
• -Containerization & Orchestration: Strong, hands‑on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions).
• -Automation & Scripting: Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or Bash to automate infrastructure and build operational tools.
• -Observability Expertise: Experience implementing and maintaining Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• -Security & Networking Foundations: Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought.

Nice to Have:

• - Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
• -BA/BS degree
• -A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast‑paced startup environment
• -Experience managing distributed data streaming platforms like Kafka (MSK).
• -Database performance tuning and query optimization skills.
• -Familiarity with Java / Spring Framework services.