Senior Backend Platform Engineer

Senior Backend Platform Engineer

Duration: Full-time, permanent

Location: Remote (EST schedule Monday-Friday)

Red Thread Innovations (RTI) is a digital innovation firm with the singular mission of building meaningful digital products that delight consumers and transform businesses. Our vision is to be the global leader in digital product development, with the largest portfolio of successful products that empower people worldwide to lead their best lives. As a company, we’re a dynamic team of experienced strategists, researchers, designers, and engineers united by a shared passion for innovation and technology.

Within RTI, we operate through two complementary arms:

• Innovation Advisory: Partnering with leading corporations, social enterprises, and nonprofits to solve meaningful problems for their customers—delivering measurable business value through technology-driven solutions.
• Ventures: Researching, incubating, and launching moonshot ideas with the potential to impact millions, if not billions, of people globally.

As a company, we are an experienced team of researchers, designers, and engineers who are all passionate about innovation and technology. We are looking for a thoughtful, strategic Senior Platform Engineer to join our agile engineering team and play a critical role in shaping and evolving the backend infrastructure that powers our systems. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to build scalable, reliable, and secure platforms that support our products and enable engineering teams to move faster and more confidently.

We offer you an opportunity to:

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of core backend infrastructure, enabling scalability, reliability, and high availability across services.
• Architect and maintain robust API ecosystems, including REST and/or GraphQL services, with a focus on reusability, consistency, and performance.
• Drive technical strategy and decision-making for platform services, infrastructure patterns, and system design across the engineering organization.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams (Product, DevOps, Security, Frontend) to design and ship scalable end-to-end solutions.
• Improve internal developer experience through better tooling, automation, and platform abstractions that enable faster, safer development.
• Evaluate and implement cloud-native technologies to optimize performance, observability, and cost-effectiveness of backend systems.
• Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of learning, quality, and engineering excellence.
• Own and optimize CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code, ensuring consistent, automated, and secure deployments.
• Proactively identify system bottlenecks, scalability concerns, and architectural risks, and lead remediation efforts.

As an ideal team member you have/are:

• 5+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and scaling infrastructure at a systems level.
• Deep expertise in API design and development, including best practices for authentication, rate limiting, versioning, and documentation.
• Strong programming skills in modern backend languages (e.g. Python, Java, Node.js) and experience working with distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure, including services like ECS/EKS, Lambda, Cloud Functions, or equivalent.
• Solid foundation in infrastructure-as-code tools (and CI/CD platforms
• Strategic thinking paired with execution ability, able to translate high-level technical vision into clear, actionable workstreams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience influencing architecture and platform decisions across teams.
• Track record of platform ownership, such as building internal tooling, managing service frameworks, or leading migrations/refactors.
• Security- and reliability-first mindset, with familiarity in designing systems that are observable, resilient, and fault-tolerant.
• Proactive and autonomous, comfortable navigating ambiguity and owning projects end-to-end.

Traits we truly value are:
● Intentionality: We obsess over solving the right problems the right way. We strive to be partners, not vendors. We elevate humanity through the relationships and products we build.
● Passion: We’re passionate about many things – delivering great digital products powered by exceptional engineering, delighting our partners and users, and nurturing teams that are fired up about unlocking the positive potential of technology
● Innovation: We don’t just see things as they are; we see them as they can be. We approach challenges with curiosity, creativity, and courage. We have the audacity to envision possibilities beyond perceived constraints.
● Ownership: We make magic happen when we’re self-motivated to show up for our teams and partners, stand behind our commitments, learn from our mistakes, and strive for excellence.
● Collaboration: We’re a team of innovators, designers, and engineers bound by our desire to take on meaningful challenges, foster enduring partnerships, deliver value to our stakeholders, and bring out the best in one another.
● Empathy: We approach people and problems with utmost compassion. We listen more than we talk. We understand the “why” before the “how.” We walk in your shoes.

Job Types: Full-time, Permanent

Application Question(s):

• What is your expected hourly rate/annual salary? (please indicate currency)
• How many years of experience do you have in a similar role?

Work Location: Remote