Founding Platform Engineer

About Savvy Wealth:

Wealth management is a $545 billion industry in the US, yet remains archaic and inefficient with low technology penetration. 75% of financial advisors don't offer digital communication beyond email, and 62% still build financial plans manually in Excel. This leads to a poor client experience and results in financial advisors spending over 70% of their time on non-client facing, manual work.

Savvy is changing that. We're building the most advisor-centric platform in wealth management: a digital-first solution that modernizes human financial advice. Advisors who partner with Savvy tap into AI-powered software, automated sales and marketing, and seamless back office workflows to scale faster and spend more time with clients.

We've raised over $105M to date from Thrive Capital, Index Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Mark Casady (former LPL Financial CEO), and other top-tier investors. Our team is made up of repeat founders and operators who've helped build Airbnb, Square, Brex, Carta, Facebook, $200B+ RIAs, and more.

Savvy is at a pivotal point in its growth trajectory, having established strong product-market fit in providing a modern platform to financial advisors. We've surpassed $5.1 billion in AUM in less than three years, grown 600%+ in the last 18 months, and are entering the next phase of the company which involves rapid expansion of our product offering and continued revenue growth. Come help us scale!

You'll be the first dedicated platform engineer at Savvy, responsible for defining how we build, deploy, and operate software as we scale. There is no existing established infrastructure playbook. You'll assess our current posture, evaluate the right tools and architecture, and build it. This requires someone who thrives in ambiguity, can make sound technical decisions with incomplete information, and writes application code regularly because great platform work demands deep understanding of the systems it supports.

Responsibilities:

• Evaluate and architect our cloud infrastructure strategy, making deliberate build-vs-buy and tooling decisions that balance engineering velocity, cost, and operational maturity
• Design and implement infrastructure-as-code foundations that give the team reproducible, auditable, and version-controlled environments
• Own the deployment pipeline end-to-end, build CI/CD systems that engineers trust and that enable confident, low-friction releases across services
• Build developer tooling and workflows that remove friction from the daily engineering experience:
  
  • Local development environments that are fast to set up and faithful to production
  • Automation that eliminates toil without adding complexity
  • Clear, well-documented patterns that help engineers self-serve
• Stand up observability and monitoring that gives engineers real insight into system behavior, not dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but tools that actually reduce time-to-diagnosis
• Leverage AI to accelerate engineering workflows, from code review and test generation to infrastructure management and cloud agents
• Partner with product engineering teams to drive adoption of platform improvements through trust and collaboration, not mandates
• Help define and build upon our background AI agent infrastructure

Must have:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience. You've built and shipped production features in web applications, not just maintained the infrastructure underneath them
• Comfort reading and contributing to a Rails/GraphQL backend and a Next.js frontend. This role requires understanding the application layer to build the right platform abstractions
• You've led or been a key contributor to at least one significant infrastructure initiative (cloud migration, PaaS-to-IaaS, platform buildout, etc.)
• Strong proficiency with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), containerization (Docker), and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform)
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred)
• Solid understanding of observability and monitoring tools (Datadog preferred) for metrics, logging, alerting, and distributed tracing
• Proficiency in scripting and automation (Ruby, Python, Bash, or Go)
• Systems thinking with pragmatism. You design reliable systems that scale for current and near-term needs without over-engineering for hypothetical futures
• Strong communication skills with the ability to drive adoption through mentorship and partnership

Nice to have:

• Experience building developer experience programs: internal CLIs, environment management tools, deployment abstractions, developer portals
• You've worked at a startup (Series A-C) where you made pragmatic infrastructure decisions with limited resources and high urgency
• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, automated code review agents)
• Familiarity with frontend build tooling (PNPM, Turborepo, ESLint, Jest/Vitest, Playwright)
• Fintech domain knowledge including financial services, regulatory compliance, or financial data integrations
• Experience with macOS development toolchains and Apple Silicon environments
• Track record of measurably improving developer productivity or deployment velocity

Qualities:

• You thrive in ambiguity, you can survey a landscape of options, make a well-reasoned call with incomplete information, and iterate as you learn more
• You default to building, not just advising. This is a hands-on IC role where you're the primary builder, not a consultant who produces architecture diagrams
• You are a software engineer first, not a pure DevOps/SRE specialist, a click-ops infrastructure operator, or a support/ticket-driven function
• You write application code regularly and consider deep product understanding a prerequisite for good platform work
• You drive adoption through influence and earned trust, not by filing tickets or issuing mandates

Benefits:

• Competitive salary and equity package
• Unlimited PTO + paid company holidays
• Access to holistic medical, dental, and vision plans
• Company 401(k), Commuter, and HSA/FSA plans
• NYC office in the heart of Manhattan
• Lunch and snacks provided in the office
• Access to virtual mental health care (Spring Health), vision related benefits (XP Health), and health concierge (Rightway) to help you find the right care
• Access to counseling for stress management, dependent care, nutrition, fitness, legal, and financial issues (Guardian WorkLifeMatters EAP)