Lead Platform Engineer

Lead Platform Engineer

Remote, Richmond, Virginia, Arlington, Virginia

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 leader to own both the people and the delivery of our platform engineering team. This is a formal people manager role — you are accountable for your team's performance, growth, and culture — while also carrying significant technical weight yourself.

You will work in close partnership with our Cloud Architect, who owns platform strategy and technology standards. Your job is to translate that strategic direction into a well-organized, executable backlog — and then drive the team to deliver it with quality and predictability. You are the bridge between platform strategy and team execution, and you take full ownership of that space.

We build in an AI-forward environment. You'll be expected to use AI tools in your own work and help establish the conditions — in pipelines, tooling, and team culture — for your engineers to do the same effectively and responsibly.

What You'll Do

People Leadership & Team Development

• Manage a team of engineers with full accountability for their performance, growth, and wellbeing
• Own 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations — providing direct, constructive feedback that helps engineers grow
• Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
• Partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation; help shape the team's working norms and resolve friction before it compounds

Technical Execution

• Be a strong technical contributor: carry significant engineering weight alongside the team and actively deliver on high-impact work
• Own day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope
• Translate architectural direction into sprint-level tasks the team can act on
• Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation: ensuring deployment safety, consistency, and velocity
• Improve observability and operational readiness across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — including actionable dashboards and SLO-based alerting
• Design and implement automation and self-service workflows using infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and developer platforms to reduce developer friction
• Implement secure delivery practices with policy-driven pipeline controls
• Contribute to infrastructure in Terraform, working within established architectural patterns and standards
• Support and improve secrets management patterns across runtime and CI/CD workflows
• Champion AI-assisted development practices across the team — prompt engineering workflows, AI-powered code review, and tooling integrations as first-class parts of the engineering workflow

Operational Readiness

• Own incident response coordination: drive the process, communicate status, and ensure issues reach the right people
• Participate in the on-call rotation and help drive improvements that reduce incidents and alert noise over time
• Build and maintain operational runbooks, escalation paths, and documentation for team-owned systems
• Drive production readiness as a continuous standard, not a one-time checklist

People Management & Team Development

• Manage a team of engineers: this is a formal people manager role with full accountability for the team's performance and growth
• Own performance management: regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and direct, constructive feedback
• Own career development: growth planning, identifying opportunities, and building engineer capability over time
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching
• Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact
• Manage team working norms, address blockers, and partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation

About You

• People Leadership Experience : Demonstrated history as a formal people manager or tech lead with direct reports — including performance management, career development conversations, and building team capability over time. This is not a senior IC role.
• Delivery Ownership Experience : You have owned timelines, driven sprint execution, and been directly accountable for what a team ships. You know how to run a team's operating rhythm, not just contribute to it.
• 7+ Years of Hands-On Experience in cloud infrastructure/platform engineering with demonstrated scope growth and increasing leadership responsibility over that time
• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform in production (modules, patterns, environment strategy, state management)
• Strong hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production
• Strong AWS fundamentals: practical experience with compute, networking, IAM, and production operations
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Strong observability fundamentals including metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLO/SLI design, and alerting strategy
• Experience building automation using Bash and at least one general-purpose language (Python or Go)
• Strong troubleshooting skills: you drive root cause analysis and implement long-term fixes, not workarounds
• Hands-on experience using AI coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude) as a productivity multiplier in production engineering work
• Comfort partnering with senior technical peers and sound judgment on when to consult vs. decide independently

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Istio or other service mesh technologies
• Experience operating relational databases in AWS (RDS PostgreSQL/Aurora/MS SQL)
• Experience with AWS Lambda or serverless architectures
• Experience improving reliability for distributed systems at scale
• Prior experience as a technical anchor or team lead in a platform or infrastructure context
• Experience building or operating infrastructure that supports AI/ML workloads (compute, storage, serving patterns) in AWS

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-$236,000 per year (depending on experience and location) Additional Compensation: This position may 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:

• 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