Lead Platform Engineer

At Koalafi we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. Thats why were making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200 Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how were transforming the financing experience and joining our team

About the role

Were hiring a hands-on engineering leader to own both the people and the delivery of our platform engineering team. This is a formal people manager role you are accountable for your teams performance growth and culture while also carrying significant technical weight yourself.

You will work in close partnership with our Cloud Architect who owns platform strategy and technology standards. Your job is to translate that strategic direction into a well-organized executable backlog and then drive the team to deliver it with quality and predictability. You are the bridge between platform strategy and team execution and you take full ownership of that space.

We build in an AI-forward environment. Youll be expected to use AI tools in your own work and help establish the conditions in pipelines tooling and team culture for your engineers to do the same effectively and responsibly.

What youll do

People leadership & team development

• 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 teams working norms and resolve friction before it compounds

Technical execution

• 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 teams 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

Operational readiness

• 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

People management & team development

• Manage a team of engineers: this is a formal people manager role with full accountability for the teams performance and growth
• Own performance management: regular 1:1s performance reviews and direct constructive feedback
• Own career development: growth planning identifying opportunities and building engineer capability over time
• Mentor engineers through code reviews pairing and delivery coaching
• Build a team culture that is organized reliable and focused on impact
• Manage team working norms address blockers and partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation

About you

• People leadership experience: 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. This is not a senior IC role.
• Delivery ownership experience: You have owned timelines driven sprint execution and been directly accountable for what a team ships. You know how to run a teams 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

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Istio or other service mesh technologies
• Experience operating relational databases in AWS (RDS PostgreSQL/Aurora/MS SQL)
• Experience with AWS Lambda or serverless architectures
• Experience improving reliability for distributed systems at scale
• Prior experience as a technical anchor or team lead in a platform or infrastructure context
• Experience building or operating infrastructure that supports AI/ML workloads (compute storage serving patterns) in AWS

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.

Salary Range: $174000-$226000 per year (depending on experience and location)
Additional Compensation: This position will be eligible to participate in company bonus plan.

The final salary offer will depend on factors including but not limited to experience skills and geographic location. The actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidates offer letter.

Applications will be accepted until position is filled.

Why choose Koalafi: A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation trust and ownership. Youll get outside your comfort zone build meaningful relationships and most of all take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits:

At Koalafi you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the companys success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best:

• 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

Who we are & what we value:

• We focus on whats most important
• We set clear expectations and deliver
• We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
• We ask How can this be better
• We move fast together