Senior Platform Engineer

Role Description

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'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.

What You'll Own

• Own the operational health of the platform - that it's available, fast, observable, and safe in production.
• Define and track SLIs and SLOs, keep the observability stack sharp (we use CloudWatch, Sentry, Papertrail, and Langsmith).
• Participate in on-call, lead incident response, run blameless post-incident reviews, and drive issues to root cause.
• Relentlessly automate remediation, sharpen alert quality, and drive down MTTD and MTTR.
• Build pipelines, deployment automation, environment management, and release tooling for CI/CD.
• Build developer-facing automation and paved roads that cut friction for the product engineering team.
• Be the platform's hands-on security operator - IAM and least-privilege hygiene, secrets management, threat detection and response, and vulnerability triage.
• Produce the infrastructure and reliability evidence that SOC 2 Type II and FERPA obligations depend on.
• Build and operate cloud infrastructure as code - AWS managed with Terraform.
• Plan and execute scaling ahead of product growth, and keep operational documentation current.
• Own the operational health of our data stores - MongoDB Atlas backups and recovery, performance tuning, and monitoring at scale.

How You'll Show Up

• Understand the "why" before the "what."
• Own the outcome - reliability, security, and operability end to end.
• Take initiative to move work forward.
• Engage collaboratively to solve problems together.

Qualifications

• 7+ years across site reliability, operations, delivery, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• A strong SRE foundation - SLI/SLO design, observability stack ownership, and incident response.
• Strong CI/CD and delivery-engineering chops - building and operating pipelines, Docker/ECR workflows, and ECS deployment automation.
• Security-operations depth - IAM governance, secrets management, network security, and vulnerability triage.
• Deep, current AWS expertise - ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, S3/CloudFront, VPC networking.
• Operational experience with MongoDB Atlas or a comparable managed database platform.
• Working knowledge of compliance operations - SOC 2 Type II and FERPA.
• Comfort operating as a high-output IC with broad domain ownership.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and full benefits - 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, and your birthday off.
• Work that matters - every release helps students find their path to college and succeed.

Our Values

• Impactful not Immediate - We prioritize and invest in initiatives that will be most impactful.
• Progress before Perfection - We are action-oriented people.
• 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.

Our Interview Process

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. We move quickly for the right people and give you a clear view of the bar before you accept.