Senior Platform Engineer

About Astra

Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale. Our platform processes billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime, powering real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and complex financial compliance systems. We provide APIs and automation tools that enable businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory requirements.

The Role

Astra is the instant payments API powering money movement for fintech, banking, and marketplace products. Every transaction that runs through our systems is real money moving in real time, and the infrastructure underneath our product is what lets our engineering team ship quickly without breaking the systems that depend on it. As a Platform Engineer at Astra, you'll build and own core infrastructure and tooling: Terraform, CI/CD, environment provisioning, and the abstractions engineers rely on to ship and run their own code. You'll work hands-on across infrastructure-as-code, deploy tooling, and observability, partnering directly with product engineers rather than sitting behind a large platform org with layers of process. This role suits someone who's energized by building leverage for other engineers, comfortable owning meaningful infrastructure surface area, and motivated by the stakes of doing this well in a regulated, real-money environment.

What You’ll Do

• Own pieces of core platform infrastructure, including the Terraform migration (VPC, IAM, networking), CI/CD pipelines, and environment provisioning, as part of a growing infrastructure team

• Build and maintain the tooling and abstractions that let product engineers ship and run their own code without solving infrastructure problems from scratch

• Advance our observability foundation, including remaining service instrumentation and building out our metrics collection pipeline

• Standardize monitoring and alerting, including business and financial operations metrics and synthetic monitoring

• Harden CI/CD pipelines, including secrets migration and building self-service deployment tooling

• Support GCP infrastructure work as our platform scales, including dead-letter queue handling and other reliability pieces of our messaging system

• Help build out compliance remediation tooling, local dev/onboarding tooling, GCP cost visibility, and infra architecture documentation as these needs are validated

• Operate independently on production infrastructure changes, since most of this work is scoped execution rather than architecture-setting

What We’re Looking For

Required Experience

• 5+ years in a platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or backend engineering role with significant infrastructure ownership

• Experience building or significantly maturing internal developer tooling, CI/CD systems, or service platforms, rather than only operating within an already-mature setup

• Experience operating in a startup or small-team environment where you own meaningful infrastructure surface area and there isn't always a playbook

• Direct experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred, AWS or Azure also relevant) in production, including infrastructure-as-code

• Track record of partnering closely with product engineering teams to unblock their work, not just maintaining infrastructure in isolation

• Comfort operating independently on production infra (Terraform, IAM, CI/CD) without heavy review

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi)

• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, or similar) and building CI/CD pipelines from the ground up

• Solid backend engineering skills in at least one production language (e.g., Go, Python, TypeScript/Node) for building internal services and tooling

• Experience designing and maintaining internal APIs and service abstractions used by other engineers

• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and how platform decisions affect reliability and debuggability

• Understanding of secrets management, access control, and secure-by-default infrastructure patterns

Preferred Experience

• Prior experience in fintech, payments, banking-as-a-service, or another regulated industry where infrastructure decisions carry real financial or compliance consequences

• Experience building platform tooling that supports compliance requirements (e.g., audit logging, data retention, access controls) alongside developer velocity

• Experience with GCP specifically, and with cross-cloud (GCP/AWS) infrastructure work

• Familiarity with database platform work (provisioning, migrations tooling, backup/replication strategy) in addition to application infrastructure

• Experience scaling internal platforms through a period of rapid engineering team or transaction growth

Why This Role Matters

• Every engineer at Astra ships faster or slower based on the platform underneath them, and this role adds capacity to a growing team

• You'll have direct influence over how we execute against a real, scoped backlog, without layers of process standing between you and the outcome

• This role enables Terraform migrations, CI/CD hardening, and observability work to move in parallel and helps our internal tooling as our platform scales

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company.

• Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements

• Small team, big impact - your work directly supports Astra’s ability to scale responsibly

• Professional growth opportunities in compliance and risk management

• Mission-driven - build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards

Remote Work and Culture

Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.