Staff Platform Engineer (Fully Remote)

The Role We Need

PadSplit is looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to provide technical leadership for our platform infrastructure and backend architecture as we continue to scale our marketplace. This role will drive platform strategy, improve system reliability and developer productivity, and partner across engineering teams to build secure, scalable solutions that support the company's long-term growth.

The Person We Are Looking For

We're looking for a highly experienced engineer who excels at solving complex technical challenges and influencing engineering direction across multiple teams. You bring deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and backend architecture, while balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution. You are a collaborative leader who enjoys mentoring others, driving technical excellence, and building systems that create lasting business impact.

Here’s What You’ll Do Day-To-Day:

• Platform Strategy - Define and drive the technical roadmap for platform infrastructure, reliability, and scalability initiatives.

• Architecture Leadership - Design and review complex system architectures that support company growth and evolving business needs.

• Technical Direction - Establish engineering standards, best practices, and technical patterns across multiple teams.

• Reliability Ownership - Improve system observability, incident response processes, and operational excellence across the platform.

• Cross-Team Influence - Partner with Engineering, Product, and Design leaders to align technical investments with business priorities.

• Mentorship & Coaching - Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance that elevates engineering capabilities across the organization.

• Platform Development - Build and improve backend services, infrastructure tooling, and shared platform capabilities.

• Risk Management - Identify technical debt, scalability risks, and operational vulnerabilities before they become business constraints.

Here’s What You’ll Need To Be Successful:

• Platform Expertise - Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale backend platforms and distributed systems.

• Django Mastery - Deep expertise building, scaling, and modernizing production Django applications.

• Cloud Architecture - Expert-level experience architecting and operating cloud environments within AWS.

• Systems Design - Proven ability to design resilient, secure, and scalable systems that support significant business growth.

• Database Leadership - Advanced knowledge of Postgres architecture, performance optimization, and data modeling.

• Operational Excellence - Experience building observability, monitoring, incident management, and reliability practices.

• Technical Influence - Demonstrated success driving engineering decisions and influencing technical direction across teams.

• Mentorship & Communication - Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical concepts and develop other engineers.

The Interview Process:

• Your application will be reviewed for possible next steps by the Hiring Manager.
• If you meet eligibility requirements, the next step would be a video screen with a member of the PeopleOps team for about thirty (30) minutes.
• If warranted, the next step would be a video interview with our Director of Platform for one (1) hour.
• If warranted, the next step would be a video panel interview with key stakeholders at PadSplit for two (2) hours.
• The panel interview will require a candidate to work on a technical assessment where you will showcase your software skills to the panel for discussion.
• If warranted, the final interview would be with our CTO.
• If warranted, then we move to contract!