Platform Software Engineer, Avant

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful time spent in production systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails, including experience with large monolithic codebases, background job frameworks (Sidekiq), and Rails upgrade paths
• Strong proficiency in Python or willing to learn as required
• Demonstrated cross-platform mindset: you’ve worked across multiple parts of a tech stack (backend services, shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling) rather than staying in a single domain
• Experience improving developer experience or building internal tools, shared libraries, or platform capabilities that other engineers consume
• Solid understanding of observability concepts (structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing) and experience implementing them in production
• Strong communication and documentation skills—you write clearly, document decisions, and can explain tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfort working across team boundaries, influencing without authority, and partnering with infrastructure, security, and product teams
• Familiarity with test suite optimization, flaky test remediation, or CI/CD pipeline performance improvements

Desirable

• Avant is looking for a Platform Software Engineer to help shape the future of our financial technology platform and who thrives at the intersection of application development and platform thinking
• This is not a pure infrastructure role—you’ll work at the application layer, building the shared patterns, libraries, tooling, and standards that every engineering team at Avant relies on
• You’ll bring a cross-platform mindset: comfortable navigating a large Ruby on Rails monolith one day, designing shared service patterns the next, and defining observability standards or governance frameworks in between
• You care about making other engineers more productive and see your success reflected in the success of the teams you enable
• This role reports to the Director of Application Platform & Developer Experience and contributes directly to reducing cognitive load, improving monolith reliability, and raising the engineering quality baseline across the organization
• Improve code health, reliability, and developer experience within the avant-basic monolith (Ruby on Rails) during its incremental decomposition
• Drive test suite reliability and performance—reducing flakiness, improving runtime, and restoring engineer confidence that green CI means safe to merge
• Implement and evangelize structured logging, tracing, and observability standards across monolith code paths
• Identify and reduce technical debt in high-risk, high-change areas of the codebase
• Contribute to Ruby, Rails, and Sidekiq upgrade readiness by evaluating changesets and resolving known incompatibilities
• Build and maintain shared application services used across domains (notifications, configuration, feature flagging, shared middleware and SDKs)
• Design and implement golden path service templates and patterns for communication between the monolith and decomposed services
• Own application-level integration patterns for shared vendors (observability platforms, workflow engines like Temporal)
• Refactor shared libraries to remove domain-specific coupling and introduce versioning and compatibility policies
• Build CLI utilities, quality automation (linters, formatters, checks), and test data generation frameworks
• Improve local development and pre-production feedback loops—faster targeted test runs, streamlined build flows, standardized local setups
• Codify and maintain engineering standards and practices: language, framework, repository, branching, and release conventions
• Contribute to the Architecture Guild and Software Engineering Roundtable by facilitating design reviews and documenting architectural decisions as ADRs
• Help centralize and maintain engineering standards, decision records, and guidelines in a discoverable, maintained engineering playbook
• Partner with PIE, Security, and Data & AI on cross-cutting initiatives that require coordination across team boundaries