Senior Platform Engineer (Cloud & DevOps) at Kindred

About Kindred

Kindred is an exclusive, members-only platform for home swapping, enabling a travel-rich lifestyle through community power. By exchanging primary residences with trusted peers, members can discover new destinations affordably. Kindred is redefining travel accommodation, offering a unique 'third option' beyond traditional short-term rentals and hotels. Since its launch in 2022, Kindred has expanded to a global community of 300,000 members across more than 150 cities, establishing home swapping as a more economical, responsible, and connected way to travel. To support this rapid growth, Kindred has secured over $150M in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors, including Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, Caffeinated Capital, Elad Gil, and founders from companies like Opendoor and Figma. The co-founders of Kindred are seasoned leaders from Opendoor's early team, with a proven track record of building and scaling products generating over $1B in annual revenue. Kindred is actively seeking top talent to help make travel more meaningful. Further insights can be found in Forbes and The New York Times.

The Role: Platform Engineer

Kindred is seeking a world-class Platform Engineer with extensive expertise in cloud infrastructure, DevOps practices, and robust backend systems. This role is for a strategic thought partner eager to build scalable, resilient infrastructure crucial for powering an iconic consumer product that will shape the future of travel.

What You Will Do

• Lead infrastructure initiatives and make pivotal decisions concerning cloud architecture, platform strategy, deployment pipelines, and infrastructure as code implementations.
• Design, build, and maintain highly scalable AWS infrastructure to support Kindred's rapidly growing platform and accelerate product development cycles.
• Develop critical internal tools, automation scripts, and backend services to significantly enhance developer productivity and operational efficiency across engineering teams.
• Collaborate closely with engineering and data teams to ensure infrastructure capabilities meet current demands while anticipating and scaling for future growth.
• Establish best practices for infrastructure, and mentor engineers across the organization on advanced cloud architecture, observability, and operational excellence principles.

Candidate Qualifications

You may be an ideal candidate for this role if you:

• Possess 5+ years of deep technical experience in platform engineering, infrastructure development, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) roles.
• Demonstrate extensive hands-on experience with core AWS services, including but not limited to EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, VPC, and IAM.
• Have strong coding proficiency in languages such as Python, Javascript/Typescript, or similar, combined with experience in building internal tools, automation, and infrastructure services.
• Are experienced in implementing and managing continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Have practical experience with observability tools, comprehensive monitoring solutions, logging strategies, and incident response protocols.
• Have a proven track record of successfully leading infrastructure initiatives and making critical architectural decisions in previous positions.
• Possess prior experience working within a high-growth stage company environment.
• Approach engineering with a client-centric mindset, viewing infrastructure as a key enabler for innovation and rapid iteration.
• Are driven by the mission of building platforms that empower teams and deliver exceptional consumer experiences.
• Exhibit strong judgment, capable of making difficult trade off decisions that balance cost, performance, security, and development velocity.
• Are an excellent listener and strong communicator, adept at cross-functional collaboration in a dynamic, fast-paced setting.
• Are comfortable navigating uncertainty and ambiguity in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.
• Enjoy the process of constructing foundational systems that will support the company's long-term growth.
• Adopt a pragmatic approach to engineering, avoiding dogmatism and selecting the most appropriate tools or processes for specific challenges.
• Bring energy, humility, and a positive attitude to work every day.

Our Benefits

At Kindred, we believe in supporting our team members. We offer a comprehensive, human-first benefits package designed to promote health, wellbeing, and connection:

• Competitive Compensation: Includes attractive cash compensation and equity opportunities.
• Health and Wellness: Comprehensive health benefits package.
• Flexible Time Off: Enjoy flexible time off, in addition to 12 paid holidays annually.
• Travel Perks: 21 credits per year to stay in Kindred homes, plus a $4,000 annual travel stipend.
• Work Environment: A remote-first and remote-flexible work environment, offering opportunities to work from anywhere globally, with options to gather in person at Kindred HQ in San Francisco.
• Team Connection: Regular team and company offsites for collaboration, connection, and team building.
• Culture: A vibrant, inclusive, and highly skilled team dedicated to protecting team chemistry, fostering high standards, providing feedback, and supporting continual growth.

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees. Kindred does not discriminate based on race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, creed, age, disability, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, medical condition, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, marital status, domestic partner status, military and veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by US federal, state or local laws, or the laws of the country or jurisdiction where you work.