Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential fintech organization seeking a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and scale the platform that powers their payment operations. You will tackle the hardest infrastructure challenges: increasing throughput, reducing latency, removing capacity bottlenecks, strengthening resilience, and making production operations more automated and predictable as the business grows.

Your responsibilities include:

• Own the technical architecture and evolution of core infrastructure: identify system limits, prioritize technical improvements, and implement changes that support increasing traffic, data volume, and workload complexity.
• Connect business understanding to improvements across the system: learn how key business workflows behave in production, trace their impact across applications, data, and infrastructure, and partner across teams to improve performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Engineer for scale and performance: build capacity models, run load and stress tests, diagnose bottlenecks across compute, networking, Kubernetes, and databases, and validate improvements against throughput, latency, saturation, and cost per workload.
• Design and build AWS infrastructure: implement resilient account, IAM, network, and service architectures; address service quotas, fault isolation, and multi-AZ or multi-region requirements as workloads grow.
• Build and operate the Kubernetes platform: improve cluster architecture, lifecycle automation, workload isolation, resource allocation, autoscaling, safe upgrades, and deployment reliability.
• Scale and optimize Aurora RDS for MySQL and Postgres: tune queries and indexes, address connection and replication bottlenecks, plan capacity, improve failover behavior, and implement safe schema changes and database migrations with application engineers.
• Improve reliability through engineering: define and instrument service-level objectives and error budgets with service owners; implement failure isolation, backpressure, load shedding, and safe retry behavior where needed to prevent cascading failures.
• Participate in on-call and drive technical recovery during serious incidents: use evidence-based triage, execute mitigations, communicate findings, and implement corrective actions from postmortems.
• Implement and test disaster recovery: design backup, restore, and failover mechanisms against agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives; run recovery exercises and document measured results.
• Build infrastructure-as-code and operational automation: make provisioning, configuration, deployments, upgrades, and recovery reproducible, reviewed, testable, and recoverable.
• Build observability that makes production diagnosable: improve metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts, with visibility into service health, scaling limits, and customer impact.
• Deliver safe infrastructure migrations: design phased rollouts, compatibility checks, validation, and rollback paths for changes to shared production systems.
• Improve cloud cost efficiency through technical changes: right-size resources, improve utilization, tune autoscaling and storage, and quantify savings while maintaining reliability and performance targets.
• Build and evaluate AI-assisted operational tooling: apply AI to investigation, runbooks, anomaly analysis, and repetitive operations, with bounded permissions, reviewable actions, and measurable improvements in accuracy or toil.

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a similar technical field
• 12+ years of experience across infrastructure, platform, site reliability, software development, or related engineering disciplines, with substantial hands-on depth designing and operating production infrastructure at scale
• Deep expertise with AWS: production experience across compute, IAM, multi-account architectures, and networking, including VPC design and private connectivity
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production: cluster lifecycle, scheduling, resource management, autoscaling, networking, and troubleshooting business-critical workloads. EKS experience is strongly preferred
• Deep expertise with relational databases at scale, specifically RDS/Aurora (MySQL and/or Postgres): query performance, indexing, connection management, replication, high availability, failover, and verified backup and recovery
• A track record of personally delivering infrastructure scaling improvements: identifying constraints, measuring baseline behavior, implementing changes, and demonstrating gains in capacity, latency, reliability, or cost efficiency
• Strong coding and automation skills, using Golang, Python, or similar languages to build production tooling and eliminate operational toil, alongside infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform or equivalent
• Strong systems fundamentals: Linux, networking, DNS, TLS, storage, concurrency, and distributed system failure modes, with the ability to debug problems across infrastructure and application boundaries
• Experience operating a 24/7, high-availability platform where downtime has direct customer or revenue impact, including hands-on incident response and postmortem remediation
• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation and demonstrated ability to recover production systems under pressure using evidence-based triage, safe mitigation, and clear technical communication
• Experience implementing and testing disaster recovery against defined recovery objectives, including restoring data and validating service recovery
• Practical experience with observability, load testing, capacity planning, and safe CI/CD practices for shared production infrastructure
• Active use of AI tooling in engineering or operations, with practical judgment about its limitations and how to verify generated code, recommendations, and operational actions
• Ability to carry ambiguous technical problems from investigation through production delivery and collaborate across engineering disciplines to resolve system-wide constraints

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience in fintech, payments, or banking, operating infrastructure with demanding reliability, security, and audit requirements
• Experience with multi-region architectures, chaos engineering, and failure testing, including the consistency and recovery tradeoffs of distributed data systems
• Proficiency with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or comparable observability systems
• Experience building internal platform capabilities and self-service tooling, including deployment automation, progressive delivery, and reusable infrastructure components
• Experience building AI-assisted incident investigation or operational automation with restricted access, auditable execution, and clear human review points

How We Work With You

Get A Job.ai represents exceptional technology organizations seeking senior talent. When you apply through our platform, our talent team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and career goals. If there's a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client for consideration. Throughout the process, we serve as your advocate and guide.

Please apply exclusively through Get A Job.ai. Do not attempt to contact the client directly, as this may disqualify your application.

Pay

This is a remote, full-time position. The technology stack includes Golang, Python, MySQL, Postgres, AWS, Kubernetes, Git, and GitLab. Our client values open-source solutions and builds custom tooling where appropriate.

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity recruiting firm. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive hiring process.