Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Job Overview

Compa is a venture-backed AI startup revolutionizing the future of compensation. In a dynamic job market with hiring challenges, accountability, and the rise of AI, companies need the best data to stay ahead of industry changes, competition, and costs. Compa has developed the premier real-time compensation data platform, delivering top-tier compensation intelligence to leading enterprise teams.

About Compa

Compa is a compensation intelligence company built to augment enterprise compensation teams in the era of AI. Our customers include the world’s biggest companies: NVIDIA, Stripe, DoorDash, Open AI, TMobile, Moderna, Workday, Ulta, Target, and more. Compa headquarters are located in Irvine, California, with growing sites in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California. We’re a collaborative, curious, and driven team that values transparency, ownership, and continuous learning and prioritizing in person work where possible.

The Role

The Compa Platform team builds and operates the systems that power our products, enable our engineers, and keep our platform infrastructure reliable as we grow. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Platform Team, you will own and lead backend and infrastructure projects across Compa's products, systems, AI/ML, and data warehouse. Join us and help design and maintain the foundation that enables the products our customers use daily!

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and the AWS infrastructure that supports them


• Develop and scale application backends in Django and Postgres, with a focus on reliability and performance


• Work on scaling, automation, reliability, and observability of backend and infrastructure services


• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and infrastructure automation on AWS


• Experience making architectural decisions and setting technical direction


• Ability to operate with autonomy in ambiguous problem spaces


• Act in a generalist platform engineering capacity on a small start-up team


• Assist in upscaling the team as new capabilities are developed, learning quickly and building shared resources that support continued growth

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering with an emphasis on backend systems


• Strong hands-on experience building and operating production systems on AWS


• Deep, hands-on experience with Python, Django, and Postgres in production


• Solid DevOps/SRE fundamentals (CI/CD, observability, incident response)


• Experience with operational excellence and a deep understanding of metrics, alarms, and dashboards


• Solid understanding of networking, distributed systems, and database fundamentals

Preferred Qualifications

• Start-up experience


• Experience handling critical incidents for production systems


• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments


• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration


• Exposure to ML Ops


• Working knowledge of security best practices and cryptographic protocols