Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure
Altruist · San Francisco, United States +1 · 4d ago
About Altruist
Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients.
We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you!
But first, our values
Kindness - Kindness doesn’t just equal niceness. We listen to understand. We embrace, and encourage healthy debate and diverse perspectives. We approach conflict openly, honestly, and respectfully.
Brilliance - Humility is the skill we’re most proud of and possessing a growth mindset is always top of mind. We take ownership in everything we touch; regularly using our unique superpowers to reach a common goal as a team. We succeed and fail as one.
Grit - When challenges arise, we stay laser focused on achieving our mission and finding a way forward, even when it’s hard. We are nimble and maintain a sense of urgency, swiftly adapting to change and overcoming obstacles.
This role follows a hybrid schedule, with three days per week onsite in our Culver City or San Francisco office.
The opportunity
We're hiring a Staff Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to join the Cloud Infrastructure & Platform (CIN) team at Altruist. This is a high-impact, team lead role responsible for architecting, building, and operating the AWS-based infrastructure that powers our broker-dealer and clearing platform. You will own critical infrastructure domains end-to-end and drive technical decisions that affect the reliability, security, and scalability of systems handling real financial transactions.
As the industry evolves rapidly with generative AI and agentic workflows, we need an AI-forward engineer who combine deep AWS and Kubernetes expertise with the vision and initiative to define how AI/ML tools and patterns can transform infrastructure operations, developer productivity, and platform resilience. This role carries significant technical influence — you will shape infrastructure strategy, lead complex cross-functional initiatives, and raise the bar for engineering practices across the organization.
What sets this role apart
This is not a ticket-driven infrastructure role. At the Staff level, we expect you to:
- Own domains, not just tasks. You will be the technical authority for critical infrastructure areas (e.g., EKS platform, observability strategy, DR architecture, or AI infrastructure) and drive their roadmap.
- Define technical direction. Author architectural decision records (ADRs), propose infrastructure standards, and influence engineering-wide technology choices through design reviews and RFCs.
- Lead by action. Drive cross-team initiatives, align stakeholders, unblock other engineers, and represent infrastructure perspectives in leadership discussions and planning.
- Multiply the team. Elevate the entire CIN team through mentorship, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and building reusable frameworks and golden paths that scale beyond your individual output.
- Bridge infrastructure and business. Translate complex technical trade-offs into clear recommendations for engineering leadership, product teams, and compliance stakeholders.
Your impact
- Cloud Infrastructure Architecture & Platform Engineering
- Architect, deploy, and operate production AWS infrastructure supporting high-availability financial services workloads (EKS, MSK, RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, and more).
- Own and evolve the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy using Terraform — define module standards, enforce code review practices, and drive adoption of reusable patterns across teams.
- Lead Kubernetes (EKS) platform strategy, including cluster upgrades, node group architecture, Helm chart governance, service mesh evolution, and workload autoscaling policies.
- Design and drive CI/CD platform improvements (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar) to enable safe, fast, and self-service deployments for application engineering teams.
- Architect and validate disaster recovery (DR) strategies, including cross-region failover designs, backup automation, and leading DR simulation exercises.
- Lead infrastructure design reviews and architectural discussions; ensure solutions meet scalability, security, and compliance requirements before implementation.
- Reliability, Observability & Operational Excellence
- Define and drive the observability strategy across the platform (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenSearch) — including SLO/SLI frameworks, alerting standards, and distributed tracing.
- Serve as a senior on-call escalation point; lead root-cause analysis on critical production incidents and drive systemic improvements through blameless post-mortems.
- Own monthly resource saturation reviews and capacity planning processes; proactively identify scaling needs and present findings to engineering leadership.
- Drive cloud cost optimization strategy: FinOps practices, Reserved Instances/Savings Plans analysis, vendor spend governance, and accountability frameworks across teams.
- Security, Compliance & Networking
- Define and enforce security architecture standards across AWS environments: IAM policy governance, VPC design patterns, encryption strategies, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), and vulnerability remediation workflows.
- Partner with Security, Compliance, and Audit teams to ensure infrastructure meets FINRA, SEC, SOC 2, and other regulatory requirements — and proactively identify gaps before they become findings.
- Own networking architecture decisions including VPC topology, Transit Gateway strategy, VPN configurations, load balancer patterns (ALB/NLB), CDN optimization (Fastly/CloudFront), and DNS management.
- AI/ML Infrastructure & Developer Productivity
- Define the strategy for evaluating, integrating, and governing AI-powered developer tools (e.g., Cursor AI, GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit) across the engineering organization — including usage analytics, cost optimization, security review, and policy frameworks.
- Architect infrastructure for AI/ML workloads: GPU-enabled compute, SageMaker endpoints, Bedrock integration, vector databases, and data pipeline orchestration.
- Lead the adoption of AI-driven automation for infrastructure operations — intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, auto-remediation, and AIOps patterns — moving from exploration to production integration.
- Build and champion internal platforms and golden paths that leverage generative AI to improve developer experience, reduce operational toil, and accelerate delivery velocity.
- Technical Leadership & Collaboration
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to the Director of Engineering and engineering leadership on infrastructure strategy, trade-offs, and investment priorities.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives spanning application engineering, data, security, and DevSecOps teams — driving alignment on complex multi-team infrastructure projects.
- Represent the CIN team in architecture review boards, incident response leadership, and engineering-wide planning sessions.
- Author and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, ADRs, and operational procedures that serve as organizational knowledge assets.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; conduct thorough design and code reviews; actively contribute to hiring and onboarding processes for the CIN team.
What you bring
- 7+ years of hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure engineering, with deep, production-proven expertise in AWS.
- Track record of owning and driving infrastructure initiatives end-to-end — from design and architecture through implementation, rollout, and operational excellence.
- Expert-level proficiency with Terraform, including module design, state management strategies, and establishing IaC standards for engineering teams.
- Extensive production experience operating Kubernetes (EKS strongly preferred) at scale — cluster lifecycle management, multi-tenancy patterns, Helm governance, and GitOps workflows.
- Strong Linux systems engineering skills and advanced scripting proficiency (Python, Bash, or Go).
- Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Jenkins) with experience designing deployment strategies for multi-service architectures.
- Expert-level understanding of cloud networking (VPC architecture, Transit Gateway, peering, DNS, load balancing) and security (IAM, KMS, WAF, GuardDuty, Secrets Manager).
- Proven experience designing and operating observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenSearch/ELK) at organizational scale.
- Strong experience with database infrastructure and data layer architecture (Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS, ElastiCache/Redis, OpenSearch, DynamoDB).
- Demonstrated ability to lead disaster recovery planning, execute DR simulations, and design HA architecture patterns for mission-critical systems.
- Excellent technical communication skills — ability to write clear ADRs, present to leadership, and translate infrastructure complexity for non-technical stakeholders.
- Proven track record of mentoring engineers and elevating team capabilities through knowledge sharing, design reviews, and tooling improvements.
Bonus points
- 7+ years of infrastructure or platform engineering experience, including 5+ years operating at a senior or staff level.
- Experience in financial services, fintech, broker-dealer, or other heavily regulated industries with FINRA/SEC compliance requirements.
- AWS certifications at the Professional or Specialty level: Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, Security Specialty, or Machine Learning Specialty.
- Experience with event streaming platforms at scale (Amazon MSK / Apache Kafka) including cluster operations, partition strategy, and consumer group management.
- Hands-on experience with API gateway management and platform design (Kong, AWS API Gateway).
- Demonstrated experience with AI/ML infrastructure: provisioning GPU compute, SageMaker/Bedrock integration, vector databases, MLOps pipelines, or AIOps automation in production.
- Experience defining and executing organizational rollout strategies for AI developer tools, including governance frameworks, usage analytics, and cost management.
- Proficiency with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA/Rego, Sentinel, Kyverno) for infrastructure governance and compliance automation.
- FinOps certification or demonstrated experience leading cloud cost optimization programs at scale.
- Experience authoring RFCs, ADRs, or technical strategy documents that influenced engineering-wide decisions.
- Contributions to open-source projects, conference talks, or published technical writing.
What we bring
Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.
- Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.
- Competitive total compensation.
- Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
- 401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
- 16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.
- Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
- Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).
- Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).
- One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).
Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with a bonus program for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our pay bands. Base salaries will be reviewed at regular intervals throughout the year, typically in conjunction with performance review cycles. By evaluating compensation on a regular basis, we are able to reward high performance and ensure all employees have opportunities for growth.
Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Altruist we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.