Lead Platform Engineer, Benepass
$170-195k
+ Equity
More information about location
Benefits administration platform
Be an early applicant
Benefits administration platform
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$170-195k
+ Equity
More information about location
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help companies distribute meaningful benefits that support the personal and professional well-being of their team.
Role
Who you are
- Technical Expertise: Advanced proficiency in infrastructure tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus) and SRE practices, enabling you to architect scalable, fault-tolerant systems and contribute hands-on to code and configurations
- Leadership & Empathy: Strong communicator who mentors peers, fosters psychological safety, and drives cross-team alignment on reliability goals
- Outcome-Driven: Passionate about owning end-to-end infrastructure outcomes, from ideation to monitoring, ensuring high availability and efficiency
- Disciplined Craft: Committed to simplicity, rigorous testing (e.g., chaos engineering), and best practices aligned with Benepass's values of scalability and security
- Experience: 5+ years in platform engineering, SRE, or DevOps, with 2+ years leading initiatives in a startup or SaaS environment (e.g., as a DRI for complex projects like Kubernetes migrations or observability platforms)
- Technical Leadership: Proven ability to design and deliver multi-system infrastructure (e.g., CI/CD pipelines, auto-scaling AWS setups), conduct rigorous reviews, and optimize for performance/security (e.g., zero-trust policies, CVE mitigation)
- People Development: Experience mentoring engineers, sharing knowledge (e.g., via workshops or tech talks), and contributing to team processes (e.g., incident response protocols)
- Delivery Excellence: Track record of managing infrastructure SDLC, defining KPIs (e.g., uptime SLOs, MTTR), and delivering high-impact solutions on time
Desirable
- Experience in fintech or regulated environments, ensuring compliant, secure infrastructure for payment or benefits systems
- Expertise in large-scale optimization (e.g., reducing cloud costs by 20%, implementing sharding/read replicas for databases)
- Proven ability to set, measure, and achieve infrastructure metrics (e.g., DORA metrics, error budgets), driving continuous improvement
- Experience evaluating and adopting tools (e.g., chaos engineering frameworks, AI-driven monitoring) to enhance reliability and efficiency
- Background in evolving from IC to lead roles, including hiring/onboarding support
What the job involves
- As a Lead Senior Platform Engineer (P3-P5) at Benepass, you will spearhead our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps/Infrastructure, and Platform functions, owning the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our core systems
- Reporting to the Vice President of Engineering, you will drive the design and implementation of robust infrastructure solutions, including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability platforms, Kubernetes orchestration, and cloud configurations (primarily AWS)
- With deep technical expertise, you will lead complex initiatives as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI), mentor junior engineers, and shape architectural decisions to ensure zero-downtime deployments and high system availability
- This role starts as a senior individual contributor (IC) lead, with potential to evolve into a management position as we expand the team in 2026
- You will collaborate closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to embed reliability principles, optimize performance (e.g., reducing latency and costs), and align with Benepass's Engineering Department Values: Own the Outcome, Discipline in the Small Things, Keep it Simple, Ship it Fast, Empathy & Open Collaboration, and Build with Craft, Stability, Scale, and Security
- Your impact will be foundational in scaling our platform to support Benepass's growth, ensuring seamless, secure benefits delivery for thousands of users
- OUR TECHNOLOGY AND STACK:
- Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, GraphQL, JavaScript, React, Tailwind CSS, React Native (plus a bit of Swift/Objective-C and Java/Kotlin when it's called for), AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus/Grafana, ArgoCD, Datadog, PagerDuty, NewRelic
Our take
The US labor market is creating higher demand for top tier talent, and many companies are looking to improve their benefits as a way of staying competitive. Strong health insurance and holiday policies, however, no longer cut it. Benepass is a benefits administration company looking to help companies stay ahead in this new landscape.
The basic Benepass premise is that pre- and post- tax benefits should be flexible and accessible for employees. As things stand, tax-advantage benefits are hugely under-leveraged by employees: they’re either unsuitable for individual employees, or are procedurally complicated or difficult to use. Benepass’ app centralises and simplifies the process, allowing employees to explore, track, and exercise benefits from a single platform and VISA card.
Building Benepass’ product around a card is a nice twist. Platforms like Zestful and Compt, who are similarly directed towards simplifying communication and education around employee benefits, don’t yet offer the same tangible feature. They’re also not as focused on the more complex area of tax-advantage benefits - which make substantial savings for employers as well as employees. Benepass’ solution is an easy win/win, and in today’s labor market conditions an increasingly necessary one.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
8% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2024
$20m
EARLY VC
Sep 2021
$12m
SERIES A
Total funding: $34.2m
Company benefits
- Healthcare: We pay $430 per month toward your health insurance and fully cover dental and vision. You also get membership to OneMedical, Teladoc and Talkspace
- Flexible, autonomous work: We’re remote first so live where you’re most happy. We come together in-person as a team 3-4 times per year
- Benepass perks: $500 to set up your home office, $100 per month for wellness, however you define it, $150 per month for home internet and cell phone, $150 per month for co-working
Company HQ
Greenwich Village, New York, NY
Leadership
Jaclyn Chen
(CEO & Co-Founder)Previously an Associate at Goldman Sachs, then TPG Capital, before moving on to work in Business Development at Teampay.
Mark Fischer
(Co-founder)An ex-Google Mechanical Engineer, who went on to hold a Senior Robotics Engineering role at X: The Moonshot Factory.
Kabir Soorya
(CTO & Co-Founder)An In-Q-Tel technologist who then worked on the Senior Technical Staff at Sidewalk Labs.
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