Platform Engineer (Toronto)

Build something great. Accelerate your career.

Job Description

Reffie is an early-stage startup building the next-generation workflow and data analytics platform for residential real estate owners, operators, and property managers.

Ancient software causes renting to be a painful experience for everyone involved. Our mission is to streamline rental communications and house families faster.

As a platform & reliability engineer at Reffie, you would be among our first five engineering hires outside of the founding team. You will shape many of our technical decisions and have a critical impact on our product.

We are looking for highly driven, independent and creative engineers. We are strongly biased towards people with previous start-up experience. We expect our engineers to move quickly, rapidly learn and adopt new technologies, and cleverly approach new challenges.

Why Work for Us?

  • We are a small and passionate team with an expanding Toronto presence. If you enjoy collaborating with other top-tier engineers in a fast-paced environment then this job is for you (hybrid model).

  • We are funded by some of the most well-respected early-stage VCs and investors, including Haystack, Trust, and Redbud. Our customer count is growing rapidly, which presents unique scaling challenges.

  • You want to have a big impact on a product. You want to work on cutting-edge technologies across the stack.

  • You want to enter on the ground floor of a fast-growing startup, learn a ton, and accelerate your career trajectory.

About the Role

  • You will help design, provision, and maintain our AWS + k8s infrastructure for maximum reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

  • You will work on metrics collection, observability, and alerting for this infrastructure. This may include creating dashboards, webUI, and tooling.

  • You will participate in the development of deployment strategies focusing on simplicity and maintainability, including CI/CD pipelines.

  • You will track down and fix complex issues spanning the entire stack (an illustrative recent issue: a slow SQL query from a misbehaving microservice caused a head-of-line blocking issue, degrading the performance of all other services using that same database).

  • You will develop clean, maintainable, testable code (because moving quickly means building together).

About You

Required

  • BS/MS in Computer Science or related field.

  • You have 3+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or devops engineering.

  • You are experienced with the modern cloud infra stack, with an emphasis on AWS: GitHub Actions CI/CD, Terraform, Kubernetes + EKS.

  • You are proficient in performance monitoring and alerting including using Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana Alert Manager, and PagerDuty (or similar).

  • You are comfortable with git and the Linux bash command-line.

  • You’re adept at writing and debugging backend code (ideally Python, but other languages are fine).

Be prepared to answer technical interview questions and code in all required languages and technologies.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with Python as a backend language. Bonus points for FastAPI knowledge.

  • Experience with Serverless Framework.

  • Familiarity with Postgres and debugging SQL problems.

Consider applying even if you don’t meet all the nice-to-haves. Our ideal candidate is, most importantly, a fast learner.

Hiring Process

screening call → technical interview → take-home test (est. 3hrs) → review & culture fit

Tech Stack

  • Backend is written in Python with a mix of k8s microservices (EKS) and AWS Lambdas. Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS and our DBMS is Postgres.

  • Terraform is used for infrastructure provisioning. Grafana for monitoring.

  • Frontend is a statically built React app written in TypeScript and served using S3 + CloudFront.

Our philosophy in choosing technology is: debugging problems is hard enough without finding problems in core infrastructure. Simple is better.

To Apply

Send an email with your resume to careers [at] reffie [dot] me. Resumes must:

  • Include a link to your LinkedIn profile.

  • Include a link to your GitHub profile.

  • Be in PDF format.

  • Have max 2 pages.

Your resume should also highlight your level of competence with the required skills where relevant. In the body of the email, please include a link to your favourite XKCD comic to indicate you read the instructions all the way to the end.

Please note: We will not be accepting applicants who are not located in the Toronto area. Work authorization in Canada is required.