Platform Engineer (Toronto)

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About Reffie

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

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

As one of our first five engineering hires beyond the founding team, you will influence key technical decisions and architect features that have a direct impact on hundreds of thousands of renters.

We are looking for highly driven and creative engineers who enjoy collaborating and working in person with other talented engineers. We are strongly biased towards people with previous start-up experience. You should thrive on shared problem-solving, fast feedback loops, and the kind of technical and creative momentum that only happens when smart people are in a room together.

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 Reffie's AWS + k8s infrastructure for maximum reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness. This infrastructure undergirds all of the messages, tours, computation, and ML inference on Reffie's platform.

  • You will work on metrics collection, observability, and alerting for this infrastructure. Think "reliability as a service". This may include creating dashboards, webUI, and tooling.

  • 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 help us create seamless zero-downtime releases and deployment strategies. An illustrative example: how do you change the schema of a DynamoDB table which is constantly being written to?

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 tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Grafana Alert Manager, and PagerDuty (or similar).

  • You are comfortable with git and the Linux bash command-line. You have worked with at least one GitOps tool such as ArgoCD before.

  • 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.

  • Experience with MLOps.

  • 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 and Loki for log collection.

  • 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.

Interview Tips

  • Come Prepared. We expect candidates to do some Googling before they hop on a first call.

  • Show Your Passion. We love building things and expect our team members to share that drive. Come to the interview ready to talk about an interesting project, a tool you've tried recently, or some research you've read. If you have an interesting and relevant past project to demo, that's a huge bonus.