Back to jobs

Engineering Lead, Platform Engineering

Remote (US), Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

About the role

We’re hiring a hands-on Engineering Lead to join our Platform Engineering team. You’ll lead a small team while remaining actively involved in technical design, implementation, and delivery.

Partnering closely with our Cloud Architect, you’ll translate platform strategy and architectural direction into executable work, make day-to-day technical decisions within the team’s scope, and help the team deliver high-quality, reliable platform capabilities predictably.

What you’ll do

Lead platform engineering and delivery

  • Lead the team’s day-to-day technical execution, planning, prioritization, and delivery.
  • Translate platform strategy and architectural direction into a clear, actionable backlog and break complex initiatives into achievable phases.
  • Use AI tools in your own work and help engineers use and build with AI effectively and responsibly, including shared platform capabilities for approved AI models and services.
  • Stay hands-on with design, implementation, code review, troubleshooting, and delivery while serving as a technical anchor for the team.
  • Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, automation, APIs, and self-service developer workflows that improve safety, consistency, and developer velocity.
  • Contribute directly to our AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform-based platform, improving established patterns and platform capabilities.
  • Improve observability and operational readiness through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, SLOs, alerting, and production-readiness standards.
  • Partner with Architecture, Security, and engineering teams to create secure, reusable paved roads and technical guardrails.
  • Maintain visibility into timelines, dependencies, tradeoffs, and risks, removing blockers and communicating clearly with engineering leadership and partners.

Develop the team

  • Support and mentor a small team through one-on-ones, feedback, coaching, pairing, and code and design reviews.
  • Set clear expectations and help engineers connect their work to team and company outcomes.
  • Build a culture grounded in ownership, reliability, inclusion, learning, and measurable impact.
  • Take increasing ownership of formal people-management responsibilities as your experience grows, partnering with the VP when escalation or additional support is needed.

Drive operational excellence

  • Participate in the Platform Engineering team’s on-call responsibilities and continuously improve the reliability of platform-owned systems.
  • Reinforce Koalafi’s “You Build It, You Own It” model by giving engineering teams the tooling, observability, standards, and guidance they need to operate their systems successfully.
  • Support incident response when platform expertise is needed and drive root-cause analysis and durable corrective actions for platform-related incidents.
  • Improve runbooks, automation, alerting, escalation paths, and operational tooling to reduce incidents and unnecessary manual work.

About you

  • Technical leadership: You’ve led engineers through technical direction, delivery ownership, mentoring, or people management and can demonstrate strong judgment and accountability for team-level outcomes.
  • Delivery ownership: You’ve owned timelines, priorities, and execution and have been accountable for what a team ships.
  • Platform experience: You have 7+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure or platform engineering experience, with increasing scope and leadership responsibility.
  • Strong production experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, and CI/CD.
  • Strong observability fundamentals across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, SLOs/SLIs, dashboards, and alerting.
  • Experience building automation with Bash and at least one general-purpose language such as Python or Go.
  • Strong troubleshooting and root-cause-analysis skills, with a track record of implementing durable fixes.
  • Hands-on experience using AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude in production engineering work.
  • Strong judgment when partnering with senior technical peers and the ability to turn complex technical direction into clear plans and measurable outcomes.

Preferred qualifications

  • Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies.
  • Experience with AWS relational databases, serverless architectures, or distributed systems at scale.
  • Prior experience as a technical anchor, team lead, or people manager in platform or infrastructure engineering.
  • Experience building or operating platform capabilities for AI-enabled applications, such as model APIs or gateways, observability, evaluation infrastructure, agent/tool integrations, or model-serving platforms.
  • Familiarity with production AI concerns including security, access control, cost, latency, reliability, and governance.

Location: Richmond, VA; Arlington, VA; or Remote (U.S.). Associates near one of our office locations may work in-office, hybrid, or remotely. Remote opportunities are available to candidates throughout the United States.

Salary Range: $174,000-$226,000 per year (depending on experience and location)
Additional Compensation: This position will be eligible to participate in company bonus plan. 

The final salary offer will depend on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, and geographic location. The actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

Applications will be accepted until position is filled.

 

Why choose Koalafi: A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation, trust, and ownership. You'll get outside your comfort zone, build meaningful relationships, and most of all, take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits:

At Koalafi, you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the company’s success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best:

  • Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
  • 20 PTO days + 11 paid holidays
  • 401(k) retirement with company matching
  • Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement 
  • Commuter assistance
  • Parental leave (maternal + paternal)
  • Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs

Who we are & what we value: 

  • We focus on what’s most important
  • We set clear expectations and deliver
  • We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
  • We ask, “How can this be better?”
  • We move fast together

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Education

Select...
Select...
Select...
Select...
Select...
Please indicate your preferred office location: *
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Koalafi’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 07/31/2029

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.