Lead Platform Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That's why we're 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 we're transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

About the role

We're hiring a hands-on Engineering Lead to join our Platform Engineering team. You'll lead a small team while remaining actively involved in technical design, implementation, and delivery.

Partnering closely with our Cloud Architect, you'll translate platform strategy and architectural direction into executable work, make day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope, and help the team deliver high-quality, reliable platform capabilities predictably.

What you'll do

Lead platform engineering and delivery

• Lead the team's day-to-day technical execution, planning, prioritization, and delivery.
• Translate platform strategy and architectural direction into a clear, actionable backlog and break complex initiatives into achievable phases.
• Use AI tools in your own work and help engineers use and build with AI effectively and responsibly, including shared platform capabilities for approved AI models and services.
• Stay hands-on with design, implementation, code review, troubleshooting, and delivery while serving as a technical anchor for the team.
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, automation, APIs, and self-service developer workflows that improve safety, consistency, and developer velocity.
• Contribute directly to our AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform-based platform, improving established patterns and platform capabilities.
• Improve observability and operational readiness through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLOs, alerting, and production-readiness standards.
• Partner with Architecture, Security, and engineering teams to create secure, reusable paved roads and technical guardrails.
• Maintain visibility into timelines, dependencies, tradeoffs, and risks, removing blockers and communicating clearly with engineering leadership and partners.

Develop the team

• Support and mentor a small team through one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, pairing, and code and design reviews.
• Set clear expectations and help engineers connect their work to team and company outcomes.
• Build a culture grounded in ownership, reliability, inclusion, learning, and measurable impact.
• Take increasing ownership of formal people-management responsibilities as your experience grows, partnering with the VP when escalation or additional support is needed.

Drive operational excellence

• Participate in the Platform Engineering team's on-call responsibilities and continuously improve the reliability of platform-owned systems.
• Reinforce Koalafi's "You Build It, You Own It" model by giving engineering teams the tooling, observability, standards, and guidance they need to operate their systems successfully.
• Support incident response when platform expertise is needed and drive root-cause analysis and durable corrective actions for platform-related incidents.
• Improve runbooks, automation, alerting, escalation paths, and operational tooling to reduce incidents and unnecessary manual work.

About you

• Technical leadership: You've led engineers through technical direction, delivery ownership, mentoring, or people management and can demonstrate strong judgment and accountability for team-level outcomes.
• Delivery ownership: You've owned timelines, priorities, and execution and have been accountable for what a team ships.
• Platform experience: You have 7+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with increasing scope and leadership responsibility.
• Strong production experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, and CI/CD.
• Strong observability fundamentals across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLOs/SLIs, dashboards, and alerting.
• Experience building automation with Bash and at least one general-purpose language such as Python or Go.
• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause-analysis skills, with a track record of implementing durable fixes.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude in production engineering work.
• Strong judgment when partnering with senior technical peers and the ability to turn complex technical direction into clear plans and measurable outcomes.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies.
• Experience with AWS relational databases, serverless architectures, or distributed systems at scale.
• Prior experience as a technical anchor, team lead, or people manager in platform or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience building or operating platform capabilities for AI-enabled applications, such as model APIs or gateways, observability, evaluation infrastructure, agent/tool integrations, or model-serving platforms.
• Familiarity with production AI concerns including security, access control, cost, latency, reliability, and governance.

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: $174,000-$226,000 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 candidate's 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. You'll 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 company's 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 what's 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