DevOps Engineer, AWS, Remote

DevOps Engineer, AWS, Remote

Role Summary

Join FT Partners as a DevOps Engineer and be at the forefront of optimizing our AWS infrastructure for a game-changing fintech platform.

About FT Partners Engineering

The primary purpose of the engineering team at FT Partners is to expand and maintain the proprietary software platform that the company runs on. This is a bespoke CRM, Deal Management, Employee Operations and Data platform all in one, providing the company a competitive edge, and employees a highly efficient process.

High expectations are placed on the engineering team, but we are also afforded autonomy and breadth of context to provide holistic solutions to investment banking operations and data challenges. Our philosophy is to continually simplify our system while providing increasingly powerful features. We are committed to constant renovation of our tools and approaches. Where we provide unique creative solutions, we want to be among high quality modern industry standard tried and true foundations.

Role and Responsibilities

Our services are predominantly AWS, using Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, RDS, Amazon SQS, and various other services. Our codebase is Python/Django backend leveraging Django Rest Framework (DRF), and TypeScript and Vue on the frontend. Successful candidates will know what a secure, robust, observable, low-maintenance system should look like for serving a full-featured web app and running asynchronous automated tasks.

This person should also have the expertise to make it a reality, diligently and iteratively, in collaboration with our engineering team. We want our tooling to be the right size for the job, explainable, air-tight in security, and no more complex than needed (we probably don’t need Kubernetes!). We want a small surface area for maintenance burden, vulnerabilities, and complexity.

This candidate will also have demonstrated experience working with AWS. We don’t indefinitely necessarily need to remain on Elastic Beanstalk to manage, deploy and scale our application, but again, we are wary of introducing undue complexity or a homegrown solution when a robust one exists we can borrow.

Short term objectives of the role will include: Optimizing infrastructure to scale available computation power based on load with Elastic Beanstalk, improving logging and tooling to increase visibility into and quantify our applications’ performance, and Active management of existing EC2 instances to scale where needed and decommission where obsolete. Long term aspirations encompass leveraging AWS Lambda or a similar serverless technology to open the flood gates on scaling workload on various applications, and implementing Infrastructure as Code to better provision and manage hardware configuration.

Your responsibilities will be to

• Continuously audit and improve the security of our AWS infrastructure, keeping the system as simple as needed to account for the security and stability of every aspect
• Provision, manage and assist with integration of AWS services
• Develop and iterate continuous delivery systems
• Integrate error reporting system, monitoring, and alerting
• Establish development environments including offline
• Streamline systems for consistency, and assist with integration of security at all levels of development
• Build systems that are easy for other engineers to understand and expand on, through technology/library choices, code style (readability matters), and documentation
• Evaluate new services and experiment with them prior to incorporation
• Collaborate with engineering on database infrastructure, security, and efficiency
• Understand when it is worth containerizing and when it isn’t
• Contribute to team task visibility through participation in our ticket tracking system, daily standups, and sprint planning

General Qualifications

• 4+ years as a DevOps Engineer using AWS

• Architectural & Networking Mastery: Comprehensive understanding of cloud-native architectures, high-availability systems, and AWS networking services like VPC, security groups, and Direct Connect.
• Cost & Resource Management: Proficiency in monitoring and optimizing AWS costs, coupled with the ability to design and implement efficient backup and disaster recovery plans.
• Security & Compliance: Expertise in AWS security services (IAM, WAF, KMS), governance tools, and ensuring adherence to compliance standards.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Skilled in automating infrastructure deployments using AWS CloudFormation or Terraform, and familiar with AWS automation tools like CodeBuild and CodeDeploy.
• Operational Excellence & Continuous Learning: Commitment to AWS best practices, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and staying updated with the rapidly evolving AWS ecosystem.

• Communication & Collaboration: Exceptional writing and verbal communication skills. Ability to communicate complex technical issues to the team, gather feedback, and refine DevOps processes in a collaborative environment.
• Have overseen a significant portion (or all) of a company’s DevOps activities, rather than just a small part of a larger corporation.
• U.S. work authorization required. FT Partners will not sponsor applicants for work visas at application or in the future.

Team Player

• Team player who can contribute to building a positive team spirit, keeps commitments, inspires the trust of others, works with integrity and ethically, and upholds firm values
• You are collaborative, you recognize that as an engineering team (especially a small one) we succeed together, and we fail together.
• You are comfortable asking for help, context, and ideas, and you are happy to provide help, context, and ideas to your team.
• You keep looking into new ways to do things and are willing to replace your own previous solutions in favor of new standards that become available.
• You have a healthy fear of introducing complexity into the system.

Nice to haves

• Startup experience and comfort wearing multiple hats
• Experience with medium-large databases and task queues
• Integrating cloud infrastructure and VPN infrastructure
• Python/Django development experience

Benefits of this role

• The small but growing team offers plenty of opportunity for growth and making major DevOps infrastructure decisions
• Our offices around the world are the direct consumers of the digital products we build, so you’ll have direct feedback on the impact of your work
• Team culture that values training, social events, and an international and diverse environment

This role will be based in the San Francisco office. 3 / 2 Hybrid.

Why FT Partners?

• Managing Partner and Managing Directors formerly of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan
• Award-winning execution; Investment Bank of the Year / Boutique of the Year Awards (among many others)
• Executing both billion dollar and early stage / high-growth VC transactions
• Excellent career path, strong and competitive compensation
• Unparalleled deal flow with premier client base
• Access to world-class executives at high-growth companies
• Dominant footprint in the one of largest sectors: financial technology
• Top-notch financial sponsor relationships
• Close-knit, rapidly growing team

Company Description: Financial Technology Partners (aka “FT Partners”) is the only investment banking firm focused exclusively on the financial technology sector. We broadly define the sector as the dynamic convergence of technology-based solutions and financial services. FT Partners was recently recognized as "Dealmaker of the Year" and "Investment Banking Firm of the Year" by The M&A Advisor.

The firm was founded by Steve McLaughlin, Managing Partner, formerly a senior investment banker in Goldman Sachs & Co.'s Financial Technology Group and Financial Institutions Group in New York and San Francisco. The firm's Founder and senior bankers are all highly experienced investment bankers formerly with the financial technology, M&A and investment banking groups of Goldman Sachs & Co in New York, San Francisco, London and Los Angeles.

Selected transactions include advising:

• Heartland Payments on its $4.5 billion sale to Global Payments (NYSE:GPN)
• Payoneer on its $3.8 billion SPAC Merger with FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp.
• Assurance on its $3.5 billion sale to Prudential (NYSE:PRU)
• MoneyLion on its $2.9 billion SPAC Merger with Fusion Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: FUSE)
• Mercury Payment on its $2.0 billion sale to Vantiv (NYSE:VNTV)
• SquareTrade on its $1.4 billion sale to Allstate (NYSE:ALL)
• Stone on its $1.4 billion IPO (Nasdaq:STNE) and $100 million concurrent private placement from Ant Group
• GreenSky on its $1.0 billion IPO (Nasdaq:GSKY)
• Finicity on its $1.0 billion sale to Mastercard (NYSE:MA)
• CardConnect on its $750 million sale to First Data (NYSE:FDC)
• ShopKeep on its $440 million sale to Lightspeed (TSX:LSPD)
• AvidXchange on its $388 million growth financing
• OakNorth on its $270 million financing
• PPRO on its $270 million Growth financing
• Checkout on its $230 million Series A financing led by Insight Partners and DST Global
• Feedzai on its $200 million Series D financing led by KKR
• Divvy on its $165 million Series D financing
• Amount on its $81 million Series C financing

Inclusion and Equal Opportunity Employment: Financial Technology Partners is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veterans status, Aboriginal/Native American status or any other legally-protected factors.