{"id":438158,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer","title":"Staff Infrastructure Engineer","company":{"id":171844,"name":"Kikoff","domain":"kikoff.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kikoff","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":100,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":307000,"max":352000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":352000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Pulumi","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ruby","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Fargate","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":true},{"name":"IAM","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-13T19:26:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T20:45:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":75,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":75},"description":"Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale\nKikoff 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.\nWe're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.\nWhy Kikoff:\nThis 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.\nAbout the Role\nKikoff'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.\nAs 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.\nThis 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.\nAI 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.\nIn This Role, You Will\nBuild and Own Critical Platform Systems\nDesign 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.\nOwn the systems you build in production, including reliability, security, capacity, cost, upgrades, incidents, and recovery.\nGive critical services an SLO, actionable alerts, a useful dashboard, a runbook, and a tested recovery path.\nAutomate recurring operational work and eliminate failure-prone manual steps rather than allowing them to become permanent processes.\nRun Infrastructure as a Product\nWork 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.\nMeasure outcomes for internal customers through adoption, developer feedback, delivery speed, reliability, cost, toil, and on-call load.\nUse the fastest responsible path when a team is blocked, then turn recurring friction into automation or a durable platform capability.\nSet Technical Direction\nSet technical direction for ambiguous infrastructure work, then carry it from problem framing and design through implementation, rollout, and production ownership.\nMake clear trade-offs among delivery speed, reliability, security, cost, and long-term operational complexity.\nPartner across Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Product Engineering to build security and compliance controls into normal engineering workflows.\nRaise the Engineering Bar\nReview 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.\nLead through incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and ensure the system is better after service is restored.\nCreate standards, reusable patterns, and durable documentation that improve how teams build, deploy, observe, and operate software.\nYou Have\n7+ years of infrastructure, platform, or software engineering experience, or an equivalent record of Staff-level technical impact.\nSustained ownership of a consequential production system. You have operated what you built, handled incidents and unfamiliar failure modes, and improved the system afterward.\nStrong coding skills in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, or a similar language. You can build production software, not only configure tools.\nProduction experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, containers, CI/CD, observability, and the security boundaries around them.\nExperienced generalist judgment. You have depth in at least one infrastructure domain and can learn quickly across adjacent ones.\nA track record of building platform capabilities that engineers adopted because they solved real problems and were easier to use than one-off alternatives.\nClear, direct communication. You can explain a technical decision, its evidence, and its tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners.\nNice to Have\nDeep experience in one or more of observability, developer productivity, cloud compute, networking, storage, data infrastructure, or security.\nExperience with Pulumi and TypeScript on AWS, including ECS or Fargate, k8s, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, and IAM.\nExperience building and operating an early-stage platform through rapid growth in fintech or another regulated environment.\nWhat We're Like\nScrappy. 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.\nRisk-oriented. We make tradeoffs deliberately. A mature team knows the difference between a risk worth taking and one that is not.\nData-obsessed. We look at the data, understand the mechanics behind it, and use that evidence to make better decisions.\nHumble. 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.\nBase Range\n$307,000—$352,000 USD\nA note on applying: We know great candidates sometimes hold back if they don’t meet every qualification listed. If you’re excited about this role and believe you can do the work, we encourage you to apply. We’re looking for capability and trajectory, not a perfect checklist match.\nEqual Employment Opportunity Statement\nKikoff 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.\nPlease reference the following for more information.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6938,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Personal Finance Apps & Education","Consumer Loans & Pawnshops"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T07:17:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 28 · green card filings: 6","filings_12m":28,"filings_prev_12m":12,"green_card_filings_12m":6,"median_offered_wage_usd":192794,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":11}],"liveness":{"score":51,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.846,"p_room":0.6,"age_days":74,"expected_fill_days":100,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:late","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":352000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-28T00:01:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":40,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-29T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":171844},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=171844"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkikoff-staff-infrastructure-engineer"}]}