Position Overview
Aether Platform Engineering is the team that keeps our cloud operations product running at scale. We build the infrastructure, tooling, and internal services that power every feature our customers depend on — from real-time event ingestion to policy evaluation engines that process millions of decisions per hour.
We operate with high autonomy and a strong ownership culture. Engineers here are expected to take ideas from RFC to production, make architectural decisions, and stay accountable for reliability once features ship. If you're energized by complex distributed systems and care deeply about the developer experience of your teammates, this role is a fit.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate distributed platform services — event pipelines, policy engines, and data APIs — handling millions of requests per day
- Drive architectural decisions end-to-end: write RFCs, get alignment, implement, and own the outcome
- Improve platform observability through structured logging, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting
- Build and maintain internal developer tooling and CI/CD infrastructure so engineering teams ship faster with fewer incidents
- Collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to deliver features that meet enterprise SLAs and compliance requirements
- Lead code reviews and design discussions; mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar on the team
- Participate in on-call rotations, drive incidents to resolution, and follow up with clean postmortems and action items
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience
- Strong programming skills in Go and/or Python; comfortable writing and reviewing production-quality code
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale (thousands of RPS or more)
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP)
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment tooling
- Strong communication skills; able to explain trade-offs clearly in writing and in design reviews
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with stream processing systems (Kafka, Flink, Kinesis, or similar)
- Knowledge of observability tooling — Datadog, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi)
- Prior work in a multi-tenant SaaS platform context with enterprise compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001)
- Experience building internal developer platforms or golden-path tooling
- A track record of mentoring engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives
The Ideal Candidate
- Systems thinker — you design for failure, think about cascading effects, and rarely get surprised by edge cases
- Ownership-oriented — you don't wait to be told what to do; you identify the highest-leverage problem and go fix it
- Clear communicator — you write precise RFCs and can explain a complex trade-off to an executive or a new grad alike
- Pragmatic — you know when to move fast and when to slow down and be careful
- Collaborative — you make the engineers around you better through pairing, reviews, and honest feedback
About Aether
Aether is building the cloud operations platform for the modern enterprise. Our product helps infrastructure, security, and platform teams manage policies, costs, and compliance across multi-cloud environments — with the real-time visibility and automated enforcement that large organizations need.
We're headquartered in Austin, TX with a remote-first culture and offices in San Francisco and New York. Our team is ~150 people and growing. We care deeply about building a workplace where people do their best work, feel included, and are rewarded fairly.
Salary Transparency
Salary is one part of Aether's competitive compensation package. For US-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $140,000 and $185,000. Offers are based on the candidate's experience and geographic location and may exceed this range. In addition to base salary, our package includes equity grants, an annual performance bonus, and a comprehensive benefits plan.
Equal Opportunity
Aether is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.