Element451
Senior Platform Engineer
1w ago
WorldwideSeniorRemoteci/cdinfrastructuresecurityautomationdata reliability
Senior IC role responsible for platform reliability, security, operations, and automation in an AI-powered education platform.
Responsibilities
- You'll keep Element451's platform reliable, secure, and operable - and build the delivery systems that let it scale without scaling the firefighting. This is a hands-on senior IC role, and a deliberately broad one: reliability and operations are the core, with CI/CD and delivery, security, infrastructure, and data reliability all real, recurring parts of the work. You'll partner closely with our Director of Platform Engineering, who owns the platform strategy; you own a large share of the operational and delivery execution that brings it to life.
- We hold a high bar - and we give you the ownership, context, and support to meet it. The work has range and a fair amount of unpredictability; the people who thrive in it tend to want exactly that.
Requirements
- 7+ years across site reliability, operations, delivery, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with a track record of hands-on delivery - including real startup experience where you owned broad, shifting scope without a large team behind you.
- A strong SRE foundation - SLI/SLO design, observability stack ownership, and incident response in a production environment with real customer impact.
- Strong CI/CD and delivery-engineering chops - building and operating pipelines (GitHub Actions), Docker/ECR workflows, and ECS deployment automation, with progressive delivery and automated rollback - enough to co-own the delivery platform, not just consume it.
- Security-operations depth you can own without a security team behind you - IAM governance and least-privilege, secrets management, network security and threat detection (WAF, GuardDuty), and vulnerability triage and remediation. You'll be the org's hands-on security practitioner, so the judgment to set an operational bar - not just follow one - matters here.
- Deep, current AWS expertise - ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3/CloudFront, VPC networking, IAM, and Secrets Manager - plus strong Terraform and infrastructure-as-code discipline across multi-environment systems.
- Operational experience with MongoDB Atlas or a comparable managed database platform - backup and recovery, performance tuning, and monitoring at scale.
- Working knowledge of compliance operations - SOC 2 Type II and FERPA - and producing audit evidence (we use Vanta) as a byproduct of good engineering rather than a separate effort.
- Comfort operating as a high-output IC with broad domain ownership and a long execution horizon. Current familiarity with AI-assisted operations - intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, or AI-augmented incident response - is a plus.
Conditions
- We invest in our team the same way we invest in our product - thoughtfully, and for the long term.
- Competitive pay and full benefits - a salary calibrated to the seniority of the role, plus comprehensive medical & dental coverage for you and your family.
- Truly remote - We're built remote-first, not remote-tolerant.
- Time to recharge - flexible PTO, paid company holidays, tenure milestones that reward your commitment, and your birthday off.
- Work that matters - every release helps students find their path to college and succeed once they get there. Your craft has a real human impact.
How to apply
- Our process is rigorous and designed to be real signal - for you and for us. Expect live, interactive technical assessment with our engineers - real systems and real operational scenarios, not take-home busywork or trivia. You'll show how you reason about reliability, security, and trade-offs under pressure, and how you apply AI tooling in the work. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.
Other
- Element451 is building the AI-powered platform reshaping how colleges and universities recruit, enroll, and support their students - and the reliability of that platform is what earns the trust of the institutions that run on it. This is a rare chance to own reliability, operations, and security at the level where it actually happens: keeping a real production system healthy, fast, and safe, and building the automation that keeps it that way. If you're a broad operator who's happiest when a single week spans operations, delivery, security, infrastructure, and data - and you've done that work where things move fast and the edges go unowned - you'll feel at home here.
- You own the operational health of the platform - that it's available, fast, observable, and safe in production - and you build the automation that makes those properties durable rather than heroic. In practice, you:
- Own the reliability discipline in practice - define and track SLIs and SLOs, keep the observability stack sharp (we use CloudWatch, Sentry, Papertrail, and Langsmith), and make system health and customer impact legible in real time.
- Carry production operations day to day - participate in on-call, lead incident response, run blameless post-incident reviews, and drive issues to root cause rather than patching symptoms.
- Treat operational toil as engineering work to eliminate - relentlessly automate remediation, sharpen alert quality, and drive down MTTD and MTTR rather than absorbing manual load.
- Own and evolve the CI/CD and delivery platform alongside the Director of Platform Engineering - build pipelines, deployment automation, environment management, and release tooling - so shipping is routine, safe, and low-drama, with progressive delivery, automated rollback, and production validation gates as standard.
- Build the developer-facing automation and paved roads that cut friction for the product engineering team - treating them as the platform's customer and making the reliable, secure path the easy path.
- Be the platform's hands-on security operator - IAM and least-privilege hygiene, secrets management, threat detection and response (WAF, GuardDuty), and vulnerability triage and remediation against SLA. This is the security function in practice today; you partner with the Director of Platform Engineering on strategy and standards, and you're trusted to set the operational bar where none exists yet.
- Keep the platform audit-ready by default - produce the infrastructure and reliability evidence that SOC 2 Type II and FERPA obligations depend on (we use Vanta), so audits are a byproduct of good operations, not a scramble.
- Build and operate cloud infrastructure as code - AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3/CloudFront, VPC) managed with Terraform, with no manual or snowflake infrastructure in any environment.
- Plan and execute scaling ahead of product growth, and keep operational documentation current - failure modes and recovery procedures included.
- Own the operational health of our data stores - MongoDB Atlas backups and recovery, performance tuning, and monitoring at scale - so data stays durable, performant, and recoverable.
- We hire for behavior as much as for experience. Our values describe how we work, and we look for people who already operate this way:
- Understand the "why" before the "what." You dig for the reason behind the work and tie operational, delivery, and security decisions to real customer and business impact - rather than executing tickets on faith.
- Own the outcome. You're on the hook for the result, not the task - reliability, security, and operability end to end - and you're genuinely unsatisfied with "it mostly works."
- Take initiative to move work forward. You see the unowned edge and close it, surface risks early, and instinctively ask "how do we make this permanent and self-healing?" rather than waiting to be told.
- Engage collaboratively to solve problems together. You treat the engineering team as the platform's customer, work in the open without heroics or silos, and are energized rather than rattled when a day spans an incident, a deploy, a security finding, and a database.
- Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.
- Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people. We are empowered to make decisions and achieve our goals.
- Learners before Masters - We are curious and humble people who strive to constantly improve.
- Together not Alone - We rally behind each other and pitch in to support the greater whole.
- Customer Success not Support - We solve partner goals and prioritize their success.