Senior Platform Engineer

Job description

Localize is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to join our growing product engineering team. As Localize expands, the scalability, reliability, and performance of our infrastructure and applications have become paramount. As a critical member of our product engineering team, you will own and improve Localize’s technical infrastructure, databases, and platform tooling, including monitoring, alerting, and maintenance. Your scope extends beyond delivering product tickets: you will strengthen the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and be responsible for the scalability, stability, reliability, performance, and security of the Localize platform. You will partner closely with leadership and fellow product engineers to translate business priorities and customer needs into execution, remove obstacles, and make thoughtful tradeoffs that keep the team moving forward. Like every product engineer at Localize, you are expected to be customer-obsessed and business-aligned: connect technical decisions to customer trust, product quality, and business outcomes. This role reports directly to the Engineering Manager. This is a hands-on software engineering role as well as an infrastructure ownership role. You will be expected to operate at a senior backend engineering level, contributing production application code and owning complex changes from design through rollout and ongoing operation. You will also contribute across the stack when needed to deliver complete customer-facing solutions, balancing product development with infrastructure, security, and developer experience priorities. Key Responsibilities: Oversee and manage Localize's infrastructure across AWS and Cloudflare. Design, build, test, and maintain backend services, APIs, and background processing workflows. Work hands-on in the Localize application, including the dashboard, public APIs, legacy workers, and BullMQ workers; not only the infrastructure that supports them. Own complex product engineering work end to end: clarify requirements, propose pragmatic designs, implement application and infrastructure changes, and validate releases in production. Contribute frontend changes when needed to complete the customer experience. Apply sound engineering judgment to data modeling, API contracts, asynchronous processing, and failure handling. Diagnose and resolve application-level performance and reliability issues, including inefficient queries, queue bottlenecks, and search behavior. Raise the quality and maintainability of the codebase through automated tests, thoughtful code reviews, and incremental refactoring. Share knowledge and mentor teammates on backend design, debugging, and operationally sound software development. Ensure the scalability, reliability, performance, and security of Localize's data stores, specifically Redis and MongoDB, through effective configuration, monitoring, query optimization, and backup management. Own and improve deployment process and release processes, emphasizing automation, repeatability, safe rollouts, and reliable rollback procedures. Partner with product engineers to improve the full SDLC, including development environments, CI/CD, automated quality and security checks, and release readiness. Treat this work as a core engineering responsibility alongside product delivery. Take a leading role in infrastructure security and SOC 2 Type II compliance, partnering with engineering leadership and compliance stakeholders to operate and improve technical controls, maintain audit-ready evidence, support audits, and remediate findings. Responsibilities include access management, vulnerability management, change management, logging, and backup and recovery controls. Help lead incident response and blameless post-incident reviews, translating lessons into improvements that protect customers and reduce recurring operational risk. Prioritize infrastructure and SDLC improvements based on customer impact, business priorities, and risk. Communicate tradeoffs clearly and assess results through reliability, delivery speed, security, and cost-efficiency. Own and improve monitoring of uptime and performance using tools such as Datadog, Clickhouse, HyperDX, and more Identify, plan and implement improvements and optimizations for infrastructure regarding cost, reliability, scalability. Develop and maintain detailed documentation and maps of our infrastructure and dependencies. Play an active role in Developer Experience enhancement Actively learn new technologies and systems to improve the efficiency and capabilities of our infrastructure. Technologies Experience with the specific technologies below is a plus unless listed under Must-Have Skills. Security and compliance, including support for SOC 2 Type II, are core responsibilities of this role—not optional areas of involvement. AWS: Elastic Beanstalk, SQS, Cloudfront, EC2, Elasticache, Route 53, VPS Platforms: Kubernetes, AWS Beanstalk, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions Languages: Terragrunt, OpenTofu, Terraform Monitoring: Clickhouse, Datadog, HyperDX, Grafana Security & Compliance: SOC2 Type II Cloudflare DNS, Workers, Zero Trust (WARP) Business Intelligence: Stitch, Metabase, Snowflake Application Technology: MongoDB (Atlas + Cloud Manager), Typescript, React Must-Have Skills: 5+ years engineering experience. At least 4 years of experience in a Platform Engineer role. Expertise in managing and optimizing infrastructure in AWS. Redis and MongoDB, including configuration, monitoring, optimization, and management of backups. Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools OpenTofu and Terragrunt Experience with manual or automated deployment & release management. Understanding of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes and tools. Hands-on experience securing production infrastructure, including least-privilege access controls, vulnerability remediation, secrets management, and security monitoring. Ability to translate security and compliance requirements into repeatable engineering practices, maintain evidence of control operation, and support SOC 2 Type II audit readiness and remediation. Experience partnering with product engineers to improve the SDLC and balance feature delivery with reliability, security, and developer productivity. A customer-obsessed, business-aligned approach: understand how infrastructure decisions affect customers, prioritize work by impact, and explain technical tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical stakeholders. Skills in assessing and optimizing performance of infrastructure and applications for improved performance, reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Demonstrated senior-level backend engineering experience: independently designing, shipping, and maintaining production application features and services, beyond infrastructure configuration and scripting. Strong hands-on proficiency with Node.js and JavaScript/TypeScript, including API development, asynchronous programming, automated testing, and debugging production systems. Experience designing application data models and reliable background jobs, including safe retries, idempotency, and failure recovery. Ability to reason about performance and correctness across application code, databases, and queues. Ability to work across backend and frontend boundaries, learn the relevant parts of our application stack, and collaborate with product engineers to deliver complete features. Communicate designs and tradeoffs clearly, give constructive code reviews, and help teammates solve difficult technical problems. Proficiency in command line scripting Disaster Recovery Planning including data integrity and availability in case of emergencies. Experience with APM and logging tools such as DataDog, New Relic, Sentry, or Kibana. Nice-to-Have Skills or Experience: Product Engineering languages and frameworks such as Typescript, React, Mongoose, LESS, and more Applied LLM engineering: Hands-on experience integrating LLMs into production systems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or similar) Strong understanding of prompt engineering, context engineering, and token management Experience designing or implementing RAG pipelines, embeddings, and vector search Familiarity with emerging LLM infrastructure patterns and protocols (e.g., MCP, tool/function calling, agents) Working in a fast-paced environment where you’re accountable for your work and you’re passionate in working with customers Benefits & Perks: You’ll be joining a close knit and talented team, with plenty of opportunity for professional growth. We offer compensation + benefits that are on par with large companies, while also placing a high value on maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Competitive salary 401(k) plan + 4% matching 100% company-paid health, dental, and vision insurance Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance Work anywhere in North America (we are 100% remote) New Macbook (or computer of your choice) Monthly stipend for home internet costs Generous PTO package About Localize: The Localize platform is used by 700+ companies to automate the translation of their web and mobile applications and bring their products & services to new markets at record speed. We support organizations like The Bay Area Toll Authority in translating their payments website, Baptist Health in making their healthcare site multilingual, and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in offering their content in several languages. To see our product in action, click any of those links and use the website's language switcher to switch from English to another language. Localize works by providing a code snippet (similar to the Google Analytics JavaScript snippet) that our customers add to their website/web app. The Localize snippet pulls in content from the page into the Localize dashboard where our customers log in to add translations and manage their content. Localize automatically deploys those translations to the customer's production site, reducing development costs and accelerating time to market. We are a team of ~30 people working fully remote. We offer competitive pay, a full benefits package, and a culture with an emphasis on work + life balance. To apply: Along with your resume, send us a cover letter that showcases your personality and tells us why we should hire you. Previous experience working in a remote position is a must.