Senior Platform Engineer

What we do

Sparkwise offers a collaborative learning platform for enterprise training. We enable real-time video sessions with AI-powered workspaces where teams solve problems together without needing live facilitators. This delivers the engagement of live workshops with the scalability of digital learning.

We serve clients including Google, Harvard Business Impact, McKinsey Academy, and Financial Times running sessions globally.

What you'll do

As we scale to serve larger enterprise clients running 24/7, we need to evolve our platform infrastructure. You'll be the third engineer on our team, joining product engineers Juan and Chrystian, with a focus on platform and backend infrastructure. This is a 50% platform + 50% backend split.

Our platform was architected with senior engineering guidance and follows modern best practices. You'll find strong patterns around type safety, testing, and deployment. Your role is to evolve these patterns for enterprise scale and add new capabilities.

We view API design, multi-tenancy architecture, and authentication systems as platform engineering. You'll be designing systems that enable product engineers to build features more so than implementing user-facing features yourself.

Your first 6-12 months will focus on two critical initiatives - architecting for 10x scale and building our public API infrastructure - plus additional platform and backend responsibilities.

Critical initiatives for your first 6-12 months:

• Performance & scale architecture (Top priority): Eliminate bottlenecks and architect for 10x concurrent load growth to support our expanding enterprise client base. Key challenges: WebSocket connections, vendor rate limits, video infrastructure limits, database query optimization, real-time collaboration infrastructure

• Public API infrastructure: Design and build external-facing REST APIs for partner integrations. Build OpenAPI spec generation pipeline from our TypeScript/tRPC codebase and implement API key management system. Leverage Cloudflare API Shield for edge security while implementing application-layer business logic, and multi-tenant data isolation using PostgreSQL row-level security (RLS)

With the support of the team, you’ll maintain and evolve:

• Multi-repository infrastructure (TypeScript monorepo + Cloudflare edge applications)

• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline/CodeDeploy with blue-green deployments)

• Observability infrastructure (CloudWatch, Datadog for monitoring; distributed tracing and customer API analytics)

• Authentication & authorization (Auth0 integrations, enterprise SSO, multi-tenant access controls)

• Compliance infrastructure (SOC 2 Type II and GDPR): CTO owns compliance program management; you'll own technical implementation (security controls, audit logging, data retention automation). Vanta automates most evidence collection. There's opportunity to take on more ownership as you ramp up.

• Database operations (Prisma migrations, PostgreSQL performance tuning, zero-downtime schema changes)

• Event-driven automation infrastructure (transactional emails, calendar invites, resource provisioning)

• AI infrastructure (Cloudflare AI Gateway for LLM routing, AI guardrails, DLP, and observability)

• Help evolve comprehensive testing strategies for platform reliability

Who you'll work with

• You'll report to Ari, and will work closely with Romain and Vince:

  • Ari (CTO; co-founder) has been building edtech for 20+ years, previously serving as Chief Learning Scientist (and employee #1) at Minerva and CTO at Calbright College. CS PhD.

  • Romain (COO; co-founder) was a former People function leader at McKinsey who ran global ops, built top training programs, and coached 100s of consultants. MIT, CentraleSupélec alum.

  • Vince (CEO; co-founder) helped launch several startups at Polymath Ventures and ran multi-million dollar Future of Work transformations for F500 with McKinsey. Princeton, Harvard alum.

• You'll work closely with product engineers Juan and Chrystian and will frequently collaborate with other members of our full team

How we work

This role requires thriving in a small, high-ownership, fast-paced environment. You'll be successful here if:

• High ownership, low ego: You take full responsibility for systems from design to production, and you're eager to learn from and teach others

• Small team leverage: You're energized by having significant impact with a small team (vs. building tooling for 100+ engineers)

• Fast iteration over perfect planning: You balance moving quickly with building scalable foundations

• Low drama, clear communication: You value direct feedback, async-first collaboration, and transparent decision-making

• Prioritize prevention: We do not currently have a regular on-call rotation. As we scale to 24/7 enterprise operations, we're designing incident response processes that prioritize prevention and automation over pager duty

• Meticulous craft: You take ownership of your code and systems from design through deployment and beyond

• Team problem-solving: You enjoy solving problems both independently and collaboratively (synchronous or asynchronous), and welcome multiple perspectives as a way to arrive at better solutions

Read more about what we embrace and what we say "no" to on our Careers page.

Our tech stack

Core Application (Monorepo - Primary)

• Pure TypeScript across frontend and backend - a rare advantage! React 18, Express.js, tRPC, Prisma ORM

• Infrastructure: Docker Compose for local dev, AWS ECS/Fargate for production, PostgreSQL (AWS RDS), Valkey for caching

• Real-time & Video: Liveblocks for real-time collaboration, Amazon Chime SDK for video/audio

• CI/CD: AWS CodePipeline/CodeDeploy, GitHub Actions

• Monorepo: Yarn Workspaces managing 6+ packages

• Cloudflare platform for ancillary products: Workers, D1 (SQLite), R2 (object storage), KV, Cache

Automation & Integrations

• Event-driven workflow automation for transactional communications and resource provisioning

• Auth0, PostHog, Sentry

AI

• AI Gateway routes all LLM API calls (OpenAI, Anthropic) with guardrails, DLP, and observability

Security & Compliance

• SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant infrastructure leveraging AWS and Cloudflare security suites with CloudWatch + Datadog for observability

Development Tooling

• Prisma ORM with comprehensive migration history

• Playwright + Vitest for E2E and unit testing

• Claude Code for AI-assisted development

• Modern development tooling throughout

Sparkwise is committed to security and privacy. We are SOC 2 Type II compliant and GDPR compliant.

Why this role

Technical Challenges:

• Scale infrastructure to support rapidly growing enterprise demand while maintaining code elegance

• Build zero-downtime deployment infrastructure for a 24/7 global platform

• Own infrastructure for SOC 2 and GDPR compliance without sacrificing development velocity

Rare Stack:

• Pure TypeScript monorepo - no context switching between languages

• Modern tools: tRPC, Prisma, React 18, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions

• Clean architecture with strong type safety throughout and comprehensive testing

High Impact:

• Your infrastructure enables thousands of learners at global enterprises and top-tier professional services firms

• Early team member means you'll directly influence product direction and technical strategy

• Work closely with experienced founders (20+ years edtech, McKinsey/Minerva backgrounds)

Company Traction & Stability:

• Trusted by leading enterprises

• SOC 2 Type II certified (enterprise readiness and security maturity)

• Revenue-driven and financially sustainable - we've reached break-even and fund growth through customer revenue, giving us stability independent of fundraising cycles. Our early seed round from top VCs and angels accelerated product development; we now grow through strong business fundamentals.

• Scaling rapidly - we've already 10x'd our platform once and are preparing for the next phase of growth

What success looks like (30/60/90)

First 30 days:

• Platform: Understand our infrastructure, deploy your first changes via CI/CD, identify quick wins for observability

• Backend: Review existing tRPC API patterns and contribute your first endpoint improvements

First 60 days:

• Platform: Own a meaningful infrastructure project (e.g., enhance deployment automation, optimize Docker build times, improve monitoring dashboards)

• Backend: Design and prototype core API key authentication system for public API

First 90 days:

• Platform: Implement production observability improvements and performance optimization wins

• Backend: Ship first public API endpoints with OpenAPI documentation and rate limiting

Career growth & development

The Reality of Early-Stage Growth: As the third engineer on our team at a 10-person company, your role will evolve significantly as we scale. We're not a title-centric organization - at our stage, impact and scope matter far more than job titles. What we can promise is that as the company grows, so will your responsibilities, influence, and career options.

How We Support Your Development:

• Direct CTO mentorship: Work closely with Ari, who has 20+ years of experience building edtech infrastructure (employee #1 at Minerva, CTO at Calbright College, Chief Learning Architect at Grockit)

• Active career development: Regular conversations focused on your career goals and growth, separate from performance reviews

• Learning & conferences: We support professional development through conferences, courses, and learning resources on an as-needed basis

Potential Career Paths: As we grow, you'll have opportunities to:

• Technical Leadership: Deepen your platform expertise, own architectural decisions across multiple systems, mentor engineers joining the team, and shape our technical strategy

• Hybrid Approach: Many engineers combine technical ownership with mentoring and strategic influence without formal management responsibilities

Your growth path will depend on company trajectory, your performance, and your interests - but as an early platform engineer, you'll have the scope, support, and opportunity to grow your career significantly.

Compensation

• Salary: Competitive, commensurate with experience and location. As a reference point, this role is equivalent to Senior Platform Engineer or Staff Engineer at mid-stage startups.

• Equity: Meaningful equity stake. As an early team member, you'll have significant ownership in Sparkwise's growth.

• Other benefits include:

  • Health insurance. The specifics vary by country, but we aim to provide coverage or a reimbursement for coverage for all team members.

  • WFH home-office stipend. Expense up to USD $750 per calendar year to enhance work-from-home experience/productivity. (e.g. external monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset, stand-up desk, solo access to co-working space, etc.)

  • Paid Time Off. Responsible PTO policy. We expect each team member to take 15-20 days of PTO every year. We do not keep track of the exact number of PTO days each person takes - we trust you to use your judgment to take a responsible number of PTO days.

Requirements

Location & work hours

Sparkwise is a globally-distributed remote team with no central office/headquarters.

• This is a full-time position with typical working hours of ~50 hours per week. Your schedule must include our core collaboration hours: 12pm-4pm US/Eastern for team sync and meetings.

• You must have authorization to work in the country in which you intend to live.

• Ideally, you live+work somewhere in Americas/American time zones (UTC -7 to UTC -3), but this is not a strict requirement. Sparkwise is a US-based company, but you may live anywhere. Sparkwise does not sponsor visas or relocation.

Technical experience

Required:

• 5+ years building and scaling production systems in cloud environments

• AWS infrastructure expertise: ECS/Fargate, RDS, CodePipeline/CodeDeploy, networking, security groups, IAM

• TypeScript/Node.js proficiency: Experience with modern TypeScript tooling and ecosystem

• Relational databases: PostgreSQL performance tuning, migration strategies, zero-downtime schema changes

• Security & audit infrastructure: Experience building secure systems with audit logging, encryption, access controls, and data retention policies (SOC 2/GDPR experience helpful but not required)

• Docker & containers: Local development environments and production orchestration

• CI/CD pipelines: Building and optimizing deployment automation

• Cloudflare familiarity: Experience with Cloudflare or similar edge/security platforms

• Startup velocity: Excited by fast iteration and comfortable with ambiguity

Strongly Preferred:

• tRPC or similar TypeScript-first API frameworks

• Prisma ORM or similar type-safe database tools

• Experience with blue-green or canary deployments for zero-downtime releases

• Real-time collaboration platforms: Liveblocks (or similar WebSocket-based infrastructure at scale)

• WebRTC & video infrastructure: Amazon Chime SDK (or similar video platforms like Daily.co or Twilio Video)

• Monorepo tooling (Yarn Workspaces, Turborepo, Nx, or Lerna)

• Troubleshooting Node.js production systems under load

"Nice-to-haves"

None of these are requirements, but they'll help you ramp up faster:

• Cloudflare security services: Zero Trust (SASE), API Shield, or similar enterprise security platforms

• OpenAPI/API lifecycle management: Experience with OpenAPI spec generation, API versioning strategies, deprecation workflows, breaking change detection

• PostgreSQL row-level security (RLS) for multi-tenant data isolation

• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns

Equal opportunity

Sparkwise is an equal opportunity employer. We make employment decisions based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs - not on race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
We’re committed to building an inclusive environment where differences are celebrated and supported.