A Day in the LifeWe're looking for a Staff Engineer DevOps to join our Platform Engineering & Operations team as a hands-on individual-contributor engineer, helping to build and maintain the infrastructure underneath Lendistry's lending platform. You'll work on cloud architecture, security posture, and developer experience across a regulated financial services environment - and help support fellow engineers so we can grow without compromising reliability or compliance.
What You'll Be DoingCollaboration & Mentorship- Work as a hands-on individual contributor engineer on the Platform Engineering & Operations team, without formal people-management responsibilities.
- Help mentor junior engineers on the team, sharing knowledge as they grow their skills.
- Provide input and feedback on the technical roadmap for infrastructure and platform engineering.
Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure- Support cloud architecture and account management across development, staging, and production environments for a regulated lending platform.
- Help implement and maintain infrastructure-as-code and GitOps practices across infrastructure operations.
- Support container orchestration across multiple deployable services and cloud accounts.
Security, Identity & Compliance- Support identity management, account-level security posture, secrets management, and KMS key practices.
- Assist security and compliance teams with audits and vendor/security assessments for a regulated financial services platform.
Developer Experience & CI/CD- Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines across multiple repositories, from build through environment-gated production deployments.
- Support developer experience and internal tooling improvements for engineering teams.
Reliability & Incident Management- Participate in on-call and incident-response practices, including postmortems, for a platform where downtime directly impacts loan funding and servicing.
AI-Native Platform Engineering- Explore and help integrate AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) into infrastructure workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling.
- Support the adoption of AI-driven observability practices - anomaly detection, predictive alerting, and AI-assisted root-cause analysis - layered on top of existing monitoring stacks.
- Help support the infrastructure needs of ML/AI-driven product features (e.g., underwriting and fraud models), including model serving, inference monitoring, and compute scaling for AI workloads.
- Contribute to self-service internal tooling and golden paths that make it easier for engineers to ship safely.
Your Areas of Knowledge and Expertise- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.
- 4+ years of experience engineering highly available, enterprise-grade software and platform applications.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience in platform engineering across various cloud computing models.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience with Kubernetes, container orchestration, Docker, and cloud-native applications.
- Substantial hands-on experience with public cloud platform services such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Hands-on coding experience in at least two programming languages (Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, or .NET/C#).
- Experience with cloud-native application patterns and tools, microservices architectures, and application migrations to any cloud platform.
- Working understanding of infrastructure, virtualization, containers, networking, storage, and monitoring and logging/analytics tools (e.g., Splunk).
- Experience with application performance management tools (Splunk, AppDynamics, New Relic, Dynatrace, etc.).
- Experience with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools and processes (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Ansible).
- Experience with developer tools and open-source technologies.
- Working familiarity with MLOps/LLMOps concepts and the infrastructure needs of AI/ML workloads (GPU or accelerator provisioning, model serving, inference cost and latency management).
- Hands-on use of AI coding assistants and developer tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) in real engineering workflows.
- Familiarity with policy-as-code (e.g., OPA, Kyverno) and software supply chain security practices (SBOM generation, artifact signing/provenance) as applied to CI/CD pipelines.
Preferred Expertise- 2+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), with hands-on experience in AWS production environments.
- Experience supporting cloud platforms aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework, with an interest in security, reliability, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
- Hands-on experience with AWS core services, including VPC, EC2, IAM, Route 53, CloudFront, S3, networking, security services, and container orchestration platforms such as Amazon EKS or ECS.
- Experience working with infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform, AWS CDK, or AWS CloudFormation.
- Experience supporting CI/CD pipelines using tools such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
- Experience with cloud operations, including platform administration, production support, capacity planning, patching, and maintenance for AWS environments.
- Experience working with monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability tools such as Amazon CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and New Relic to support platform health, performance, and availability.
- Ability to participate as a technical escalation point during production incidents, supporting incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews.
- Familiarity with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including service reliability, SLAs/SLOs, incident management, change management, and operational readiness.
- Understanding of cloud cost optimization strategies, including resource right-sizing, Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, storage lifecycle policies, and automation to improve operational efficiency and reduce cloud spend.
- Experience supporting DevSecOps practices, including automated security scanning, policy validation, compliance checks, secrets management, and vulnerability remediation within CI/CD pipelines.
- Good troubleshooting, problem-solving, and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, security, operations, and platform teams.
- Interest in mentoring junior engineers and contributing to cloud engineering best practices is a plus.
- Interest in AI model governance and model-risk considerations (explainability, monitoring for drift/bias) in the context of AI-assisted decisioning within a regulated financial services environment.
Why You'll Love Working Here:- Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- Generous Paid Time Off
- Birthday Day Off
- 12 Paid Company Holidays
- 401(k) Match
- FSA and HSA
- Paid Life Insurance
- Paid Disability Insurance
- Pet Insurance
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Professional Development Courses
- In Office Provided Snacks and Drinks
- Gym Facilities (LA & Tustin/CEC Offices)
- In Office Engagement Activities
Compensation RangeThe US base salary range for this full-time position is $132,300 - $152,300 annually.
Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location.
The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum base salary for new hires for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by multiple factors like job-related skills, experience, and state of residence. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range during the interview process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include any variable compensation elements.
Physical RequirementsThis is a stationary position that requires frequent sitting (approximately 95%), repetitive wrist motions, grasping, speaking, listening, close vision, and the ability to adjust focus. It also may require occasional standing, lifting, carrying of 20lbs or less, walking, kneeling, bending/stooping, twisting, pulling/pushing, and reaching above the shoulder. Employees in this position must be physically able to efficiently perform the essential functions of the position.
