The posting
Earnest empowers ambitious professionals to make confident financial decisions and build the life they envision.
Earnies are committed to helping borrowers move forward with confidence by offering smarter borrowing options with a clearer path to taking control of their debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together.
The Senior Cloud Engineer will report to the Engineering Manager, Infrastructure.
As the Senior Cloud Engineer, you will:
- 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.
About You:
- 5+ years of hands-on experience building and managing reliable, scale-ready cloud systems (preferably in fintech or regulated spaces).
- 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.
Even Better:
- 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.
Where:
- This role will be based in the US.
Compensation:
A little about our pay philosophy: We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary based on the roles location. The successful candidate’s starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, candidate location and budget. This range may be modified in the future.
Salary Range: $184,000 - $230,000 USD. Employees are also eligible for an annual performance-based bonus and equity.
#LI-JP
Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:
- Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
- Mac computers + work-from-home stipend to set up your home office
- Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
- Robust tuition reimbursement program
- $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
- Competitive days of annual PTO
- Competitive parental leave
What Makes an Earnie:
At Earnest, our people bring our cultural principles to life. These principles define how we work, how we win, and what we expect of ourselves and each other:
- Every Second Counts: Speed is our competitive advantage. Our customers need better solutions, and the faster we execute, the greater our chance of success.
- Choose To Do Hard Things: We win by tackling the hard things that others avoid, fueled by grit and resilience.
- Pursue Excellence: Great companies, teams, and individuals never settle and are proud of the work that they do. What’s good enough today won’t be good enough tomorrow. Excellence isn’t a destination; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement.
- Lead Together: Our success comes from how we work together. Leadership is not about titles—it is about action. We take ownership, drive results, and move forward as a team.
- Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously: We take our work seriously, not ourselves. The stakes are high, but a sense of humor keeps us grounded, creative, and resilient.
At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.
Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.
