Principal Platform Engineer, Avant
$130-190k
+ Annual bonus
M, T, Th in-office
3 days a week in office
Personal credit FinTech
Be an early applicant
Personal credit FinTech
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$130-190k
+ Annual bonus
M, T, Th in-office
3 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower every customer with innovative solutions designed to help them reach their goals.
Role
Who you are
- Strong development experience with infrastructure-as-code languages and tooling: Terraform, HCL, Python, Go, and Bash
- Expert knowledge of Kubernetes ecosystem including custom controllers, operators, CRDs, and advanced scheduling with Karpenter and KEDA
- Proven experience designing and implementing scalable platform solutions that empower developer self-service and accelerate delivery cycles
- Experience architecting and managing multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters with proper resource isolation, security controls, and GitOps workflows
- Deep expertise with containerization technologies including Docker, containerd, and OCI-compliant runtimes
- Experience building robust CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, and FluxCD for both infrastructure and application delivery
- Demonstrated ability to implement and manage cloud-native service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) and ingress solutions (NGINX, Contour)
- Expertise with AWS cloud services, particularly EKS, ECR, VPC networking, IAM, and integration patterns with Kubernetes
- Experience implementing HashiCorp stack (Vault, Consul, Terraform) for secrets management, service discovery, and infrastructure provisioning
- Proficiency with observability platforms including Datadog, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry for comprehensive platform monitoring
- Experience managing stateful services in Kubernetes including databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB), message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and caching layers (Redis, Memcached)
- Experience implementing policy enforcement using OPA/Gatekeeper and secure supply chain practices with Cosign/Notary
- Expertise with infrastructure automation using Spacelift, Atlantis, or similar IaC workflow tools
- Experience integrating data platforms like Databricks and workflow engines like Airflow into Kubernetes environments
- Strong troubleshooting skills across the entire platform stack from networking to application runtime issues
What the job involves
- The Infrastructure team is responsible for the platform, tools, and infrastructure supporting Avant's customer-facing products
- As a team member, you will be developing tools to create and maintain cloud infrastructure, automate the management of complex service-oriented applications, and develop frameworks to ensure the Avant platform's stability and scalability
- Design and implement production-grade Kubernetes platforms on AWS, incorporating EKS using Terraform
- Develop automated infrastructure provisioning systems using workflows with Terraform, Helm, and ArgoCD for declarative configuration management
- Architect and maintain cloud-native platform services including service meshes, API gateways, and identity management systems
- Build developer self-service platforms with custom operators, platform APIs, and internal developer portals using tools developed internally
- Implement comprehensive observability solutions with Datadog and Sentry, enabling automated alerting, distributed tracing, and performance optimization
- Design and maintain secure multi-tenant environments with robust network policies, pod security standards, and least-privilege access controls
- Create and maintain infrastructure scaling solutions using Karpenter, Cluster Autoscaler, and KEDA for optimized resource utilization
- Implement robust disaster recovery and business continuity strategies including multi-region deployments and automated failover systems
- Establish platform security practices including supply chain security, image scanning, and runtime threat detection
- Lead the migration of traditional workloads to containerized environments with minimal disruption and maximum automation
- Continuously improve platform reliability through chaos engineering, failure testing, and SLO/SLI measurements
- Research and evaluate emerging cloud-native technologies, providing technical leadership on adoption strategies
Our take
Many Americans with below average credit scores are caught in a bind: they're unable to improve their score, and simultaneously cannot access traditional loans. Avant's alternative is to offer credit options that are powered by machine learning and based upon a large database that helps to manage risk.
For its users, the company offers a quick credit decision and speedy access to any allotted funds. It has issued over $8 billion in loans to date, and has also expanded its business through the acquisitions of ReadyForZero in 2015 and Zero Financial in 2021.
This expansion has enabled Avant to reach towards its goal of offering a whole suite of products in a single platform, such as loans, credit cards, and deposits. Although there are many FinTechs looking at ways to remove the barriers that people with low credit scores face when trying to take out loans, this expansion to banking products should help Avant to stand out.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Dec 2022
$125m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Sep 2015
$325m
SERIES E
Total funding: $779m
Company benefits
- Choice of great medical, dental, and vision insurance plan options
- 401(k) Match
- Unlimited paid time off
- Flexible work environment
- Generous paid parental leave
- Lunch allowance (Fooda) and in-office snacks
- WFH stipends for our remote employees
- Access to LinkedIn Learning for professional development
- No meeting wednesdays - (a.k.a. planned time to Get Sh!t Done)
- Summer fridays
- Fun in-office and virtual social events
- (And who doesn’t love the swag)
Company HQ
River North, Chicago, IL
Leadership
Al Goldstein
(Co-Founder & Executive Chair)They worked for a year at Deutsche Bank before founding Pangea Properties in 2008, and Avant in 2013. They have been Chair since, alongside founding Amount, Spring Labs, and StoicLane.
Paul Zhang
(Co-Founder & CIO)Having studied at the University of Illinois, they spent a year as a Software Engineer at CashNetUSA and Enova Financial. They founded Debteye in 2011, before starting Avant in 2013, serving first as CTO then Chief Architect, CTO again and finally CIO.
Matthew Bochenek
(CEO)Has been with the business since 2013, working in a range of positions including Head of US Servicing, Head of Operations and COO - before becoming CEO in 2021. Previously spend a decade at Superfund Asset Management.
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