Senior Cloud Engineer

Earnest is hiring a Senior Cloud Engineer to build and evolve the cloud infrastructure powering its lending platform. The role focuses on AWS foundations, service reliability, infrastructure automation, security and regulatory controls, cloud cost efficiency, and mentoring engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, own, and evolve critical AWS infrastructure and multi-account cloud foundations that power Earnest’s high-availability, regulated lending platform
• Define and drive service reliability standards (SLOs, observability maturity, and incident response frameworks) across engineering teams to systematically reduce MTTR and prevent repeat incidents
• Lead the design and adoption of scalable Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/OpenTofu) and CI/CD tooling, treating internal infrastructure as a product that accelerates developer velocity
• Partner with Security to embed automated security-first patterns and regulatory controls directly into the cloud lifecycle
• Drive cloud cost efficiency across the platform by identifying architectural optimizations and establishing resource utilization standards
• Mentor Cloud Engineers and software teams through technical design reviews, operational runbooks, and blameless post-incident analyses to raise the bar on engineering excellence

Requirements:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and managing reliable, scale-ready cloud systems
• Deep working knowledge of AWS core services, Linux environments, and core networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, VPCs)
• Proven track record scaling Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/OpenTofu) and container ecosystems (Kubernetes/Docker) in production
• Solid experience with relational databases, modern observability toolstacks, and a passion for automating away repetitive tasks
• A strong sense of ownership and curiosity—you comfortably navigate ambiguity and focus on long-term, durable solutions
• Clear, approachable communication skills that make technical alignment across engineering, security, and product teams feel seamless
• preferably in fintech or regulated spaces
• Experience running cloud infrastructure in fintech or similar financial environments (SOC2, PCI compliance)
• Hands-on involvement in FinOps practices or driving smart cloud cost optimizations
• Background building developer self-service platforms or internal developer tools
• Familiarity with AI/ML workloads or using AI tools to streamline operational workflows and incident triage