Sr. Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Job description

## About VGS VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust. That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster. Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. We're helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people. --- Trusted Engineering That Matters **Engineering at VGS** VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. We build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it. **Our Environment & Culture** - **Modern Tooling as Leverage:** We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment. - **Ownership of Outcomes:** Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most. - **Mission-Critical Accountability:** We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy. **Learn More:** See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our [official blog](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/blog/) and our [reliability practices](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/ras). --- ## About the Role As a Senior Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader on our Platform Engineering team. You will architect, scale, and fortify global cloud infrastructure designed to handle mission-critical, high-throughput payments applications with zero downtime. You will take ownership of key platform foundations powering our core payments infrastructure. Rather than executing against a rigid task list or holding blanket ownership over the entire platform, you will drive the technical strategy, architecture, and reliability standards for your designated domains within our multi-region AWS environment. We are looking for high-agency engineers who want to own complex distributed system challenges end-to-end and elevate how the entire engineering team operates. If you thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems, building automated resiliency, and driving modern SRE practices, we want to build the future with you. --- ## ## What You'll Do - **Build Immutable, Self-Healing Systems:** Design, build, and optimize multi-region, high-availability AWS infrastructure. You will drive our evolution from hand-crafted environments to a standardized, globally scalable fleet managed entirely through code. - **Drive Resiliency & Automation:** Replace manual toil with self-healing, automated infrastructure using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and IaC. - **Deep Observability & Resiliency:** Build end-to-end telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will own incident management and conduct blameless post-mortems to continuously harden our reliability baseline. - **Force-Multiply Engineering Velocity:** Partner closely with Product, Security, and Core Engineering teams and lead from the front by designing "Golden Paths" that strip away friction for feature teams. You will influence company-wide engineering practices and mentor the organization on how to move fast with high alignment. - **Customer Impact:** Architect and operate high-performance, low-latency private connectivity to optimize the experience for external customers. Partner strategically with internal engineering teams at the design and architectural level for platform enablement and adoption. --- ## What You Bring - **Ownership at Scale:** 10+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments. - **AWS & Infrastructure-as-Code:** Advanced proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments. - **Containerization & Orchestration:** Strong, hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions). - **Automation & Scripting:** Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or Bash to automate infrastructure and build operational tools. - **Observability Expertise:** Deep experience implementing Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry at scale. - **Security & Networking Foundations:** Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought. **Nice to Have:** - Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products - BA/BS degree - A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment - Experience managing distributed data streaming platforms like Kafka (MSK). - Database performance tuning and query optimization skills. - Familiarity with Java / Spring Framework services. ---