Senior Platform Engineer / Tech Lead - AWS Serverless, Production SaaS

**Job Title:** Senior Platform Engineer / Technical Lead — Enterprise SaaS, Production Readiness (AWS Serverless, TypeScript, Python) **Category:** Software Development · DevOps & Solution Architecture **Job Type:** Long-term work / Contract-to-Hire **Budget:** Expert Tier — Phase 1 Fixed-Price Trial Milestone, transitioning to $50–$70/hr for ongoing platform engineering and contract-to-hire. --- **About the Role:** We are a multi-tenant B2B SaaS platform currently live in staging with our first three business verticals deployed. The backend runs on AWS (serverless-native), the web application is deployed on Vercel, and our mobile application codebase is complete and pending deployment. We have real operators entering the onboarding flow today. We are seeking a technical co-leader to own the journey from staging to full production — handling reliability, observability, quality assurance, cost optimization, and the operational rigor required to run a payments-enabled platform serving real businesses. This is not a "build from scratch" role. The platform is implemented end-to-end across five deployment surfaces, thoroughly spec'd to IEEE 830 standards, and backed by a formal requirements library covering every vertical. We need an execution-focused leader to make it production-hardened and scalable. **Current Platform State (What You'll Inherit):** - **Staging Environment Live:** Three business verticals onboarding real operators today. Authentication, payments (Stripe Connect), and transactional email (AWS SES) are operational. - **5 Deployment Surfaces:** Next.js web application (Vercel), React Native mobile application (codebase complete, deployment pending), AWS CDK infrastructure (40+ Lambda functions, 10+ stacks), isolated computation modules (Python), and a dedicated admin portal. - **Serverless-First Architecture:** Event-driven, fully decoupled. Hybrid relational and NoSQL persistence with caching layer. - **Zero-Trust Security:** Passwordless authentication, hardware-bound device attestation, per-tenant data isolation, and encrypted computation for sensitive operations. - **Real-Time Infrastructure:** WebSocket-ready architecture for live broadcasting, queue updates, and operational status changes. - **ML Pipeline:** Production-ready inference orchestrations for intelligence and optimization features. - **Quality & Specifications:** Formal requirements documents per vertical, comprehensive test suites (unit, integration, property-based, E2E), and CI/CD pipelines with automated quality gates. - **Progressive Vertical Deployment:** Three verticals live now. Additional verticals are fully implemented in code and will be deployed progressively as we scale. **What You'll Own:** - **Production Deployment:** Transitioning staging to production with automated canary releases, rollback protocols, and environment promotion gates (main → staging → prod). - **Mobile App Deployment:** Taking the React Native application from codebase-complete to App Store and Google Play. - **QA & Test Engineering:** Owning end-to-end quality assurance — expanding E2E smoke test coverage, regression testing across verticals, load testing under simulated production traffic, and maintaining quality gates that block deployments on failure. - **Observability Stack:** Distributed tracing, centralized logging, alerting, and system health dashboards across 40+ serverless functions. - **Reliability Engineering:** Defining SLOs, managing error budgets, capacity planning, auto-scaling configurations, and database performance tuning under real load. - **Security Operations:** WAF tuning, automated secrets rotation, IAM least-privilege auditing, and penetration test coordination. - **Cost Optimization:** Serverless cost modeling, reserved capacity scheduling, and compute right-sizing as operator volume scales. - **Payment Operations:** Ensuring payment payout reliability, subscription billing integrity, and financial reconciliation under production load. **Immediate Production Focus Areas:** - **Infrastructure Audit:** Reviewing existing CDK stacks, IAM roles, and deployment automation for production readiness and multi-tenant security boundaries. - **Centralized Observability:** Establishing end-to-end tracing and centralized error alerting across serverless microservices and real-time gateways. - **Production Hardening:** Hardening multi-tenant isolation, reviewing webhook idempotency, and executing pre-launch reliability checklists. **What You Won't Do:** - **Rewrite the Architecture:** The platform is serverless-native by design and will remain that way. - **Manage a Team (Yet):** Through the initial launch phase, you and the founder are the engineering team. Hiring comes after production stability. - **Define the Product:** The founder owns product vision, domain modeling, and feature specifications. You own the infrastructure to deliver it safely to market. **Required Experience:** - 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years actively operating production systems at scale. - Deep, hands-on AWS mastery (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EventBridge, CDK). - TypeScript as your primary development language. - Python proficiency for backend computation modules. - A proven track record of personally transitioning a product from pre-production to live, paying users — not just inheriting a running system. - Experience with event-driven architectures and eventual consistency patterns. - A strict security mindset — IAM least-privilege, encryption at rest/in transit, secrets management, and zero-trust authentication systems. - Experience deploying and managing React Native applications through App Store and Google Play review processes. - Experience handling on-call rotations and debugging complex production incidents under pressure. **Strong Signals:** - Active AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or DevOps Engineer – Professional credentials. - Previous startup experience (Series A or earlier) navigating a production scaling inflection point. - Real-time systems experience (WebSockets, high-throughput pub/sub). - Multi-party payment platform operational experience (split payouts, connected account onboarding). - Privacy engineering experience (data residency, encryption key management, tenant isolation). **Not a Fit If:** - You want to replace our serverless architecture with Kubernetes or container orchestration. - You haven't written production-grade code in the last 2 years. - You prefer redesigning codebases over shipping optimized software. - You require a large team reporting to you to be effective. - You haven't deployed a mobile application to production app stores. **Timezone & Operational Availability:** We prioritize candidates in the Americas and European timezones for real-time collaboration. Candidates in other regions will be considered provided you have a proven track record of async execution with US-based teams and can guarantee at least 3 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern Time for critical release syncs and architectural reviews. **Confidentiality, NDA & Intellectual Property Terms:** - **Mutual NDA Required:** Execution of a formal Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement is mandatory prior to granting repository access, architecture documentation, or staging environment credentials. - **Work-for-Hire:** All work products, source code, scripts, system designs, and technical documentation produced under this contract are strict works made for hire. - **Exclusive IP Transfer:** All title, interest, copyright, and global intellectual property rights transfer immediately and exclusively to the client upon payment. **The Offer & Structure:** **Phase 1 (Initial 30–45 Days):** Fixed-price trial milestone focused on production readiness — observability, mobile deployment, QA hardening, and reliability engineering. This serves as our mutual evaluation period. **Phase 2 (Long-Term Engagement):** Upon successful execution of production milestones, this role expands into a senior leadership position with increased scope, competitive compensation, and engagement structure evolving based on mutual fit and delivery outcomes. **Leadership:** Full technical co-leadership. Your fingerprint will be on every production deployment decision and operational runbook. **About the Founder:** You will partner with a technical CEO & Founder holding AWS Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, Machine Learning Engineer Associate, and CTFL certifications. The entire platform was built solo to formal engineering specifications with full requirements documentation per vertical. This is a production partner role, not a replacement. You will work alongside a founder who understands the technology — not a business-only founder handing you a napkin sketch. **To Apply:** Please submit a concise proposal addressing these three prompts: 1. Describe a system you personally transitioned from pre-production to live paying users. What broke under real load, and what did you learn? 2. What is your systematic approach during your first 30 days when inheriting an existing, fully structured codebase with formal specifications that you did not write? 3. What is the most critical operational risk when scaling a serverless payments platform from staging to production, and how would you mitigate it?