Lead Platform Engineer

Koalafi is a company that provides flexible lease-to-own financing solutions, helping consumers make big purchases over time. They are seeking a hands-on engineering leader to manage platform engineering teams, focusing on technical delivery, team growth, and operational excellence in an AI-forward environment.

Location: Remote (US)

Salary: $174,000–$236,000 per year

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of engineers with full accountability for their performance, growth, and wellbeing
• Own 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations — providing direct, constructive feedback that helps engineers grow
• Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
• Partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation; help shape the team's working norms and resolve friction before it compounds
• Be a strong technical contributor: carry significant engineering weight alongside the team and actively deliver on high-impact work
• Own day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope
• Translate architectural direction into sprint-level tasks the team can act on
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation: ensuring deployment safety, consistency, and velocity
• Improve observability and operational readiness across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — including actionable dashboards and SLO-based alerting
• Design and implement automation and self-service workflows using infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and developer platforms to reduce developer friction
• Implement secure delivery practices with policy-driven pipeline controls
• Contribute to infrastructure in Terraform, working within established architectural patterns and standards
• Support and improve secrets management patterns across runtime and CI/CD workflows
• Champion AI-assisted development practices across the team — prompt engineering workflows, AI-powered code review, and tooling integrations as first-class parts of the engineering workflow
• Own incident response coordination: drive the process, communicate status, and ensure issues reach the right people
• Participate in the on-call rotation and help drive improvements that reduce incidents and alert noise over time
• Build and maintain operational runbooks, escalation paths, and documentation for team-owned systems
• Drive production readiness as a continuous standard, not a one-time checklist

Requirements

• Demonstrated history as a formal people manager or tech lead with direct reports — including performance management, career development conversations, and building team capability over time.
• You have owned timelines, driven sprint execution, and been directly accountable for what a team ships. You know how to run a team's operating rhythm, not just contribute to it.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure/platform engineering with demonstrated scope growth and increasing leadership responsibility over that time.
• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform in production (modules, patterns, environment strategy, state management).
• Strong hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production.
• Strong AWS fundamentals: practical experience with compute, networking, IAM, and production operations.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong observability fundamentals including metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLI design, and alerting strategy.
• Experience building automation using Bash and at least one general-purpose language (Python or Go).
• Strong troubleshooting skills: you drive root cause analysis and implement long-term fixes, not workarounds.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude) as a productivity multiplier in production engineering work.
• Comfort partnering with senior technical peers and sound judgment on when to consult vs. decide independently.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
• 401(k) retirement with company matching
• Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement
• Commuter assistance
• Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
• Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs

Additional Information

• Location: Richmond, VA; Arlington, VA; or Remote (U.S.). Associates near one of our office locations may work in-office, hybrid, or remotely. Remote opportunities are available to candidates throughout the United States.