Platform Engineer

Reports to Head of Platform & Co-Founder

This is a new way to think about Ops. Agents handle the toil, which frees you up to think about how the platform should work, where it’ll fall over as we grow, and what we probably shouldn’t build at all. Once you’ve worked that out, agents do the building.

The work compounds. If you spot a problem in one review, you can turn it into a check or a convention that every future agent session follows, so you’re not fixing the same thing twice. That’s pretty rare in Ops.

The problems are genuinely hard. It’s a distributed platform with an extension ecosystem that carries real supply-chain risk, and we release often enough that security and performance have to be automated to hold up. You’ll be part of design decisions from the start, rather than inheriting them after the fact.

If you’ve ever wanted to fix the thing that keeps causing incidents, and not just the incidents themselves, this is that job.

How Platform is Built

Swamp runs every facet of the business, from Finance to Engineering, and Platform is no different. Swamp extensions drive every infrastructure change, every data migration, every alert, and every single deployment for all services and products. Every rough edge you hit is product feedback the team, including you, can act on immediately.

From the lens of Platform, there is significant surface area where the platform perspective is critical to the success of Swamp:

- Supply chain Integrity: The CLI, extension trust chain, and our own release pipeline are what users rely on to know that what they run is what was published.

- Execution: Remote execution, workers, and workflows run untrusted or semi-trusted logic. Isolation, auth, and secrets handling have to be right.

- Scale: Swamp serve and the worker system need to stay fast and predictable as usage grows, without anyone hand-tuning them.

- Swamp Club: The community and services that support SSO, organization and authentication management, and the event-driven system.

Platform at Swamp Club is a linchpin of the organization’s success. Outside of managing and running swamp-club.com and all its supporting services, it provides the systems and architecture for:

- Engineering to ship as quickly, safely, and quietly as possible.

- Financial operations to have access to the data they need for analysis and reporting.

- Understanding system health and error patterns, including CI, flake, and performance reporting.

- Providing compliance reporting evidence outputs and processes.

Here are two articles by John Watson, Head of Platform & Co-Founder and hiring leader for this role, that describe how we have approached Platform at Swamp Club.

- Alert Triage @ Swamp Club

- Architecture @ Swamp Club

What You’d Do on a Given Day

The Platform team owns the performance and security of the organization and its products, and is embedded in how they’re built rather than bolted on afterward. We’ve built structured workflows that help agents produce code following our architecture conventions. Your job is to make sure those workflows, and the platform underneath them, hold up. A typical day might include:

- Catch the scaling cliff in a plan. An agent’s plan to fan workflows out across more workers has passed adversarial review. You spot that each job opens its own datastore connection: fine today, but at 10x load it exhausts the pool and takes swamp serve down. You send it back with two sentences on why, and the revised plan arrives in minutes.

- Shape decisions, not just outcomes. Product wants extensions to call remote services mid-workflow. Before anyone writes an issue, you work through the trust chain, credential exposure, and isolation with the product engineer. It ships with a security model, not a patch three weeks later.

- Make the safe path the fast path. CI time has crept up 20% in a month and two acceptance scenarios flake, but no single PR did it. Your reporting shows where the time and retries go, performance budgets block regressions automatically, and agents get pointed at the worst offenders.

- Turn a finding into a convention. An agent handles secrets inconsistently across two production deployments. You fix the underlying vault misimplementation and encode the convention as a skill reference, review check, or acceptance test, so the next 500 agent sessions get it right.

- Make SOC 2 evidence a by-product. No screenshots. Proof that every change was reviewed and every dependency patched within policy is wired out of systems we already run, so the auditor can self-serve any day of the year.

- Keep an eye on spend. Automated checks flag anomalies in any bill across every provider. Finance never has to ask why the cloud bill jumped.

- Keep a clean house. The business depends on a platform that is well understood, documented, performant, and reliable.

- Keep the platform healthy. You own alerting, patching, and first response: first in when an alert fires, critical CVEs patched the same day. We don’t expect every rollout to succeed, so risky changes ship with a plan for failure, and every postmortem becomes a better alert, guardrail, skill, or workflow. You build the guardrails into the machine that builds the machine.

• Software Operations fluency: You’re comfortable with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, containers, networking, operating systems, cloud platforms, and observability. You don’t need to know our exact stack on day one, but you should be able to reason about how its parts fit together, where ownership belongs, and what might break when something changes. You value clear boundaries and explicit contracts between systems and teams. Experience managing a wide range of stacks is a plus.
• Collaborating across the organization: You enjoy working with people across engineering, product, security, finance, and beyond. You ask good questions, take each team’s needs seriously, and explain technical issues without talking down to anyone. You can challenge a proposal with empathy, explain the trade-offs, and offer a practical way forward. You’d rather build a process that helps people work independently than become a gate they have to pass through.
• Reliability: People can depend on your work and trust what you tell them. You follow through on commitments, flag problems early, and are honest about uncertainty or mistakes. You bring the same care to reporting: dashboards, compliance evidence, CI metrics, and cost breakdowns should be accurate, traceable to systems of record, and useful to decision-makers.
• Production experience: You’ve operated production systems, been on call when they broke, and taken part in incident response. You know how to restore service, communicate clearly under pressure, and contribute to a postmortem that leads to meaningful improvements. That experience shapes how you build: you ask how a system will be monitored, maintained, recovered, and supported before it goes live.
• Performance instincts: You’ve profiled real systems, investigated bottlenecks across compute, memory, disk I/O, networking, and service boundaries, and considered capacity before it became a problem. You know when the available telemetry doesn’t tell the whole story and add the missing traces or instrumentation to establish what’s actually happening. You use that evidence to guide trade-offs between speed, reliability, complexity, and cost. When reviewing a design, you naturally ask where it would struggle at 10x the load and how you would test that.
• Grasp on security: You have a working understanding of software supply-chain integrity, including signing, provenance and dependency trust, alongside authentication, authorization, secrets management and isolation for untrusted code. You can work through the threats in a proposed feature, explain the risks clearly to someone who isn’t a security specialist, and recommend proportionate safeguards. Experience with SOC 2 or a similar compliance framework is a plus.
• AI fluency: You use AI effectively in engineering work: breaking problems into tasks agents can handle, giving them appropriate context, and reviewing their output critically. You can turn security, performance, and operational knowledge into instructions, checks, and tooling that help agents work reliably without constant supervision. You also understand the risks of agent-driven systems, including prompt injection, over-privileged tools, and untrusted context, and can reason about how to contain them.

Interview Process

First, on paper. Send us your resume or LinkedIn and a note about a system you’ve built, a hard call you made, and what you’d do differently now. We’re looking for the skills in the “What Matters / Qualifications” section above, not keywords.

Then, a conversation. An initial call with the hiring leader to see if you’re a good fit for us and if we’re a good fit for you. We’ll talk about how you work, what you’ve built, and what you think about the space we’re in. This goes both ways — we want you to have enough context to decide whether this is the right place for you.

Finally, the real thing. We’ll hand you an actual issue from our tracker — a well-structured platform migration task. We’ll give you time with the architecture and background. Then we’ll ask: “How would you approach this?”

We’re not looking for the right answer. There may not be one. We’re looking for your instinct and your thought process: do you jump to a solution, or do you ask the questions that need asking first? Do you think about what saying yes costs, not just what it delivers? Do you see the constraints the system is protecting, and the risks of the path you’ve chosen?

We’ll also want to hear about a time you said no to a good idea. Not a bad idea, a good one that was wrong for the moment. And we’ll want to understand how you work with agents today: not which tools you use, but how you think about the system around them.

• Annual Salary $175K-$235K in the United States
• We may adjust your salary based on your location if you reside outside the US
• You can live anywhere, as long as you work Pacific hours (8 AM to 5 PM). Life still happens during the day, like school runs, appointments and errands. Just let the team know when you’re stepping away
• Up to twice a year, you’ll join the team in person for Work Together Week at a location we choose
• Stock Options: 0.15% - 0.25% Fully Diluted
• Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), etc. We are a small company with big-company benefits provided by Deel PEO in the United States and Deel EOR outside the US.
• Benefits offered will vary by country. Please request details if you would like to know more
• A non-accrual PTO Plan, aka “unlimited”. We recommend a week off every quarter where you are completely offline
• A generous budget to meet your home office and equipment needs. Just articulate what you need, and we’ll take care of it

Elder Swamp Club, Inc., a/k/a Swamp Club, is an equal opportunity workplace. We provide everyone with fair opportunities to attain their full potential. We understand, accept, and value differences amongst people, their backgrounds, and experiences. We actively promote a sense of belonging and full participation in our practices and policies for our co-workers, partners, and customers.

We make employment decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please let us know.