Senior Software Engineer - Platform

Job description

WHAT IS LOANCRATE? We started Loancrate to make home-buying simpler and less expensive for lenders and borrowers (us!). Today, mortgage lenders are stuck running their companies on software products built 20 years ago. These products are slow, unstable, and don't lead to material improvements in efficiency. When using these systems, the average human cost to originate a loan is still over $11,000. Loancrate builds AI-native tooling to automate mortgage workflows. Our ultimate goal is fully automated origination, which has the potential to save lenders over $16B in operating expense per year. Since starting in 2020, our remote team has enabled our customers to power >$85 billion in new home loans. We are a group of people excited to tackle the complexity of the home-lending industry. We care about collaboration, very open communication covering the good & the bad so that we learn from our decisions quickly, and ultimately having fun while we're building. You'll fit in well if you like diving deep quickly! THE OPPORTUNITY Our dreams are big and we have much to build! We’re looking for someone to build the tooling and systems that let product engineers focus on shipping features fast - without having to worry about performance, reliability, or scale. This role spans infrastructure and internal developer tooling: you’ll design self-serve platforms, libraries, and automation that “just work,” enabling complex product experiences without compromising security or uptime. WHAT TO EXPECT In this role at Loancrate, you’ll ship platform improvements to production early and often - spanning infrastructure, developer tooling, and shared libraries. Within your first month, you'll be diving into mission-critical work such as... - Designing and building the systems that let engineers deploy dozens of times per day with confidence - from our Buildkite CI/CD pipelines and per-PR ephemeral environments to our IaC-managed AWS infrastructure. - Creating self-serve developer experiences - local dev tooling, templates, golden paths, and CI-integrated workflows - so “the right thing” is the easy thing. - Pioneer tooling and best practices for AI-first software engineering - from setting up background agents to autonomously make code changes to designing frameworks that allow AI product experiences to self-optimize in response to user interactions. - Extending our internal TypeScript tooling - from schema/code generation to data access libraries - so teams can build features faster with safer, more consistent primitives. - Making Loancrate's platform observable and self-healing - instrumenting our services with Datadog, building alerting that actually signals rather than spams, and reducing the blast radius of incidents before they happen. - Baking security into our platform defaults - across infra and developer tooling - while keeping engineering velocity high. - Solving interesting scaling problems as our AI-native mortgage platform grows - from Aurora PostgreSQL tuning to Kafka throughput to cost-efficient compute autoscaling. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES - Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure using Terraform and Pulumi Cloud - treating infrastructure as a product that engineering teams depend on. - Design and maintain internal developer tooling and libraries that standardize how we build and ship - code generation, shared SDKs, data access patterns, and service scaffolding. - Create and maintain golden paths for common workflows (new service setup, background jobs, event streams, APIs) so teams can ship quickly with built-in security and observability (and consistent defaults across services). - Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and per-PR ephemeral environments that make deploying feel easy and safe. - Drive reliability through SLOs, auto-scaling, incident response, and postmortems - and build systems that make the next incident less likely. - Create observability tooling and shared instrumentation libraries that give engineers real-time insight into their services. - Enforce security best practices across IAM, secrets management, encryption, audit logging, and DDoS protection. - Own the reliability and performance of our data platform (Aurora PostgreSQL) - provisioning, backups, failover, and tuning - and build tooling that makes safe usage the default. - Reduce toil through automation and self-service tooling so engineers can move fast without waiting on the platform. - Contribute to architecture decisions and documentation, and participate in on-call rotation (shared by the whole engineering team). TECH STACK Our infrastructure runs on AWS and is managed 100% with Terraform and Pulumi Cloud. Application services run in Docker on ECS EC2 or Fargate. Key services include Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache (Redis), MSK (Kafka), and OpenSearch. Our CI/CD runs on Buildkite with TypeScript pipeline-as-code. We also maintain internal TypeScript platform libraries (codegen, service templates, shared data access/instrumentation) that power consistent APIs and developer workflows across the monorepo. Observability is powered by Datadog, CloudWatch, and Sentry. DNS and CDN are handled by Cloudflare. Application code is a TypeScript monorepo running Node/Express with a React frontend and GraphQL/Apollo API layer. We use GitHub for source control. PREFERRED SKILLS AND BACKGROUND (It's okay not to have all of these things - these are just some skills we are excited about!) - 🧩 Experience building internal platforms / developer tooling: code generation, CLIs, templates, shared SDKs, or frameworks that improve engineering velocity. - 🏗️ Strong TypeScript skills and API design taste - you enjoy building stable primitives that other engineers rely on. - 🌩 Deep AWS experience across compute, networking, storage, and security (ECS, Lambda, VPC, ALB, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, MSK, OpenSearch, S3, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty). - 🏠 Strong Terraform and/or Pulumi proficiency: modules, workspaces, and CI-driven plan/apply workflows. - 🚀 Experience designing and operating CI/CD systems that help large engineering teams ship frequently and confidently. - 🔍 Track record building production observability stacks (Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, distributed tracing, SLOs). - 🧱 You’ve built “paved roads” that bake in secure, reliable defaults (instrumentation helpers, policy-as-code, safe-by-default deployment patterns). - 🔒 Security-first mindset - you proactively harden infrastructure without slowing teams down. - 🛢 Aurora PostgreSQL operations at scale: backups, PITR, failover, read replicas, query tuning. - 🧰 Comfort with Docker and container orchestration environments. - 📊 Reliability engineering mindset: SLOs, error budgets, incident response. - 🤖 Curiosity about the unique infrastructure demands of AI and LLM workloads. - 📝 Strong written communication - you document decisions and help the team understand the systems they depend on. PERKS & BENEFITS - Robust medical coverage (100% of employee + family premiums covered) - Vision & dental coverage - 401(k) - HSA / FSA - Access to lender partner’s employee loan program - Remote-first culture - work from wherever you do your best work - Flexible time off - we trust you to manage your time Loancrate is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.