Staff Software Engineer - DevOps and Infra

Location: New York, NY

Department: Engineering

Overview

• Role: Lead Software Engineer - DevOps and Infra
• 5 days a week in NYC HQ
• Base salary: $175k-250k
• Equity: Competitive Initial Equity Package + refreshers
• 3+ Years of Experience

About Pillar

Pillar is building the next-generation commodity risk management stack for the $10T physical economy. We combine real-time marketdata with AI-powered exposure modeling and automated trade generation to arm operators with precise protection from volatility. From instant execution to continuous monitoring, alerts, and recommendations, Pillar turns complex market risk into a fully managed, always-on hedging engine.

We were founded in 2023 by the youngest macro market-maker at Barclays and a trading systems engineer at Coinbase, and have raised over $20M in capital from Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), Crucible Capital, Neo, DST Global and more.

What You’ll Do

• Expand and Own the AWS Cloud: You will take full ownership of our AWS environment. We aren't just looking for someone to keep the lights on; we want you to architect, scale, and optimize our cloud footprint to support new services, ensuring our AWS presence is robust, cost-effective, and deeply integrated with our core trading systems.
• Architect the Infrastructure Stack: You will lead our transition to a full Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model. Your goal is to eliminate manual configuration by building out a sophisticated, modular Terraform stack. We want a world where our entire hybrid footprint—from cloud instances to colocation networking—is defined, tested, and deployed through code.
• System Hardening & Security: You’ll be the gatekeeper for our environments. This means managing the full lifecycle of container security, CVE remediation, and hitting our SOC2 milestones without slowing down the team.
• Observability Architecture: Beyond just setting up dashboards, you will design our monitoring strategy using to catch bottlenecks before they become outages.
• Pipeline Evolution: You'll refine our GitHub Actions and CI/CD workflows to ensure our Go, C++, and TypeScript services move from commit to production safely and instantly.
• Reliability & Response: You'll join our on-call rotation to perform deep-dive post-mortems that ensure the same bug never bites us twice—not just to patch things.

What We are Looking For

• Infrastructure Expert: You have a deep understanding of cloud services, how to scale them, and how to manage them.
• DevOps & Internal Tooling Master: You excel at building developer-focused tools and automation that make the entire engineering org more productive. You've built CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, and internal platforms that engineers love to use.
• Networking Savvy: You understand the "plumbing"—DNS, VPNs, firewalls, and load balancers—especially in the context of hybrid-cloud connectivity.
• Experience: 0–5 years in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering, with a burning desire to own the stack from the ground up.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, learn quickly, and independently figure things out in fast-moving environments.
• Exceptional problem solving skills and ability to break down and tackle complex tasks.

Benefits

• 💰 Competitive Salary & Equity
• 📈 401(k) Program
• ⚕️ Health, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance
• ⌚ Unlimited PTO and Flexible Hours
• 🍣 Paid lunch, coffee, snacks (and dinner if you’re staying late)
• 🏋️ Monthly Gym Stipend
• 🌄 Regular Team Off-Sites