Lead Platform Engineer

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 leader to own both the people and the delivery of our platform engineering team. This is a formal people manager role — you are accountable for your team's performance, growth, and culture — while also carrying significant technical weight yourself. You will work in close partnership with our Cloud Architect, who owns platform strategy and technology standards. Your job is to translate that strategic direction into a well-organized, executable backlog — and then drive the team to deliver it with quality and predictability. You are the bridge between platform strategy and team execution, and you take full ownership of that space. We build in an AI-forward environment. You'll be expected to use AI tools in your own work and help establish the conditions — in pipelines, tooling, and team culture — for your engineers to do the same effectively and responsibly. What you'll do People leadership & team development Manage a team of engineers with full accountability for their performance, growth, and wellbeing Own 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations — providing direct, constructive feedback that helps engineers grow Build a team culture that is organized, reliable, and focused on impact Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and delivery coaching Partner with the VP on people concerns that require escalation; help shape the team's working norms and resolve friction before it compounds Technical execution Be a strong technical contributor: carry significant engineering weight alongside the team and actively deliver on high-impact work Own day-to-day technical decisions within the team's scope Translate architectural direction into sprint-level tasks the team can act on Build and evolve CI/CD pipelines and delivery automation: ensuring deployment safety, consistency, and velocity Improve observability and operational readiness across metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — including actionable dashboards and SLO-based alerting Design and implement automation and self-service workflows using infrastructure-as-code, APIs, and developer platforms to reduce developer friction Implement secure delivery practices with policy-driven pipeline controls Contribute to infrastructure in Terraform, working within established architectural patterns and standards Support and improve secrets management patterns across runtime and CI/CD workflows Champion AI-assisted development practices across the team — prompt engineering workflows, AI-powered code review, and tooling integrations as first-class parts of the engineering workflow Operational readiness Own incident response coordination: drive the process, communicate status, and ensure issues reach the right people Participate in the on-call rotation and help drive improvements that reduce incidents and alert noise over time Build and maintain operational runbooks, escalation paths, and documentation for team-owned systems Drive production readiness as a continuous standard, not a one-time checklist People management & team development Manage a team of engineers: this is a formal people manager role with full accountability for the team's performance and growth Own performance management: regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and