Platform Engineer

Job Overview

Introducing Kepler, a platform that makes AI outputs reliable, traceable, and verifiable. We're building the infrastructure layer that wraps around AI models to ensure their outputs are trustworthy. The model is a replaceable component, but the harness is the product.

What You'll Own

You'll own the infrastructure foundation of Kepler's AI research platform. The cloud, databases, deployment fabric, and security posture that financial institutions stake their workflows on. Every model invocation, every analyst query, every enterprise deployment runs on what you build.

This is the first dedicated platform hire. You're defining how Kepler ships, scales, and earns trust from the most security-conscious buyers in the world. This isn't a service role. It's the role that defines how Kepler ships.

• Own the AWS account architecture, Pulumi baseline, and deployment pipelines the whole company depends on.


• Stand up the enterprise deployment model (single-tenant, in-VPC, BYOK).


• Set the security baseline (SOC 2 controls, audit logging, identity, network isolation) that converts procurement reviews into closed deals.


• Establish the paved path: service templates, CI/CD, secrets management, and observability defaults so every engineer ships safely without thinking about it.

Long-Term Responsibilities

• Drive Kepler's database strategy at scale: Postgres performance, replication, tenant isolation, schema evolution as we ingest billions of provenance-tagged records.


• Own production reliability: SLOs, on-call rotations, incident response, postmortems. Build systems that earn trust under real load.


• Set the architectural patterns that compound as the team grows: capacity planning, cost discipline, and service standards that others reach for.

How We Work

We're a close team, working together in an office in New York. We use AI tools heavily: Cursor, Claude Code, whatever makes us faster. Fluency is assumed. Our users are analysts at firms where a wrong number costs real money. The feedback loop on what you ship is hours, not quarters.

The pace is startup-fast but the engineering bar is high. We care about getting things right, not just getting things out. If you've worked somewhere that moves fast but ships broken software, this is different. If you've worked somewhere that's rigorous but slow, this is also different.

The team has strong backgrounds and low ego. We expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and handle the unglamorous problems: the weird regressions, the subtle bugs, the last minute debugging session before a demo. We move as a team, not as a collection of individuals.

Who You Are

You think of platform as a product, not a service. Your users are other engineers, and you measure success by whether they ship faster because of you. Friction is a bug. You'd rather make every path to prod 30 seconds shorter than ship a new service yourself.

You've been the one paged at 3am, and you decided to fix the underlying system, not just the symptom. You set the patterns that compound: architectural standards, cost discipline, observability defaults. The choices that look small today become the team's foundation a year from now.

From the technical side:

• 5+ years building and operating production cloud platforms. You've owned the AWS account, the