Senior Platform Engineer

District Partners is recruiting for an established investment firm that is rebuilding how its technology platform is designed, automated, and operated. The team is small, the surface area is large, and the cloud foundation now underpins everything from trading and analytics to a fast-growing set of AI-enabled capabilities. Leadership is investing heavily in modernization this year, which means the infrastructure has outpaced the headcount supporting it and they need someone to own the platform rather than just keep it running. This role exists now because the firm is moving from a single overloaded engineering function toward a deliberately built platform organization, and they want an engineer in the seat before the next wave of build-out. You would be shaping that foundation, not inheriting someone else's finished system.

The client is a lean, well-capitalized investment firm operating in a regulated financial environment. Technology sits close to the business, and the engineering group is small enough that individual contributors carry real ownership and have visibility all the way up to senior technical leadership. This is a hands-on platform role inside a team that values judgment, automation, and people who can operate modern infrastructure in a performance-sensitive setting.

What You'll Be Owning:

• A cloud foundation built and governed as code across development, test, and production, with you owning the standards rather than chasing drift
• Reliable, secure, repeatable delivery pipelines that let a small engineering team ship quickly without giving up control
• Production visibility that surfaces problems early, spanning monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing
• A defensible security posture across identity, access, network segmentation, secrets, and workload hardening in a regulated context
• Resilient, highly available infrastructure, including failover and continuity strategies that hold up under real conditions
• The platform groundwork that modern data services and AI-enabled applications depend on
• Practical use of AI-assisted engineering tools to reduce toil and speed troubleshooting, applied with sound operational judgment

The Environment:

This is a small team carrying a broad mandate, which is exactly why the role was created. Much of the deep platform work today is concentrated in a single senior leader, and the firm is intentionally distributing that ownership so the function can scale. You would report into the infrastructure group and work closely with software engineering on architecture decisions. Expect breadth over narrow specialization, direct access to decision-makers, and a short path from idea to production. The firm values builders and strong learners who bring energy and want to grow as the organization expands, not caretakers.

What You Bring to the Table:

This is a selective search and the client is prioritizing a focused group of high-caliber candidates.

• A stable, full-time career track with meaningful tenure and clear progression in each role
• Strong hands-on experience with a major public cloud across compute, networking, identity, security, and storage
• Deep experience building and governing infrastructure as code
• Solid cloud networking fundamentals, including virtual network design, routing, connectivity, and security controls
• Strong Linux systems administration supporting production workloads
• Experience designing and operating delivery pipelines for distributed or containerized applications
• Experience with enterprise observability tooling
• Comfort with version-controlled, automation-first engineering workflows
• Scripting ability is required; broader coding ability in a JVM language or Python is a meaningful plus and opens additional scope
• Working familiarity with JVM-based application environments and distributed NoSQL data platforms is helpful
• Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences

Also valued:

• Experience with highly available, multi-region architectures and automated failover
• Familiarity with identity, SSO, and zero trust access patterns
• Recognized cloud certifications across architecture, DevOps, or security tracks
• Exposure to platforms supporting analytics, data engineering, or AI-enabled workloads

A strong plus, not required (financial services background):

• Experience operating infrastructure inside a regulated financial services environment, such as a mortgage REIT, fixed income investor, or similar buy-side firm
• Working knowledge of SOX and IT general controls, audit expectations, and access governance in a regulated setting
• Exposure to trading, investment, or other performance-sensitive financial platforms where uptime and security carry real business stakes

Compensation (base plus bonus and equity): total compensation potential of approximately $190,000 to $250,000

• Base salary in the range of $160,000 to $215,000
• Annual performance bonus plus equity participation, with flexibility for an exceptional candidate

Engagement: full-time, direct hire, individual contributor with room to grow

Location: Washington, DC or New York metro

Work model: hybrid, on site a few times a month and as needed, with direct exposure to senior technical leadership. The on-site cadence may become more regular over time, though that is not a current requirement

What stands out: unusually broad ownership for a single role, real investment in modern infrastructure and AI tooling, strong quality of life, and a clear runway for advancement as the team scales