Senior Platform Infrastructure Engineer

What is Spade?

Financial institutions process billions of transactions every day across cards, ACH, wires, and third party aggregators. But most of that data is difficult to use. Descriptions are inconsistent, merchant names don’t match, and categories vary by payment type.

Spade is a data and AI platform that turns messy transaction strings into structured, verified records — and gives teams the tools to act on it across authorization, attribution, analytics, and AI initiatives. Spade leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, matching accuracy, geolocation data, and speed of transaction enrichment. Customers such as FIS, Bilt, Mercury, Stripe, alongside many other leaders in fintech and financial services, trust Spade's data to enable personalized rewards programs, accurate applied spending rules, precise analytics requests, and innovative AI-powered features.

Spade is a fast growing, Series B company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including Oak HC/FT, a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We’re a lean and execution-oriented hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of background, experience, and opinion. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

As a Senior Platform Infrastructure Engineer, you'll own the systems that keep Spade's core platform fast, reliable, and scalable. You'll work across the full infrastructure stack — from the cloud services and data pipelines that power our enrichment APIs, to the developer tooling and observability systems that keep our engineering team moving quickly. This is a high-ownership role on a small team, where your decisions directly shape the reliability of products processing hundreds of millions of transactions.

• Collaborate on our technical vision to build and scale internal infrastructure that engineers and customers love
• Develop and maintain low-latency, massively-scalable infrastructure for data ingestion, reporting, and developer-facing APIs.
• Continuously improve our engineering best practices by designing and implementing systems that allow us to expand our platform while maintaining high quality and solid observability.
• Debug production issues across all levels of the stack
• Bring a strong collaborative approach to deliver value to customers and internal stakeholders at Spade

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary? 

Must-have:

• 5+ years of experience building and scaling AWS Cloud Infrastructure (ECS/Fargate, RDS Aurora Serverless, Terraform/CDK etc).
• Experience with highly scalable networked APIs, Postgres, data pipelines, and async processing
• Experience building and scaling with Python and Django
• Experience and opinions with implementing effective observability instrumentation and ensuring alerts are timely and actionable
• Experience building tools and systems that empower internal developers to deliver business value rapidly
• Experience building systems from scratch, making trade-offs, and executing autonomously in early-stage environments
• A product mindset and strong problem solving skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and focus on delivering customer value, for internal developers and the customers they build for
• A collaborative mindset, fostering a culture of mentorship, shared success, and continuous improvement
• Based in NYC

 Nice-to-have:

• Experience with building and supporting infrastructure in multiple AWS regions
• Experience with Open Telemetry
• Experience with Pganalyze
• Experience with transaction, merchant, and/or location data
• Experience and/or interest in fintech and/or data products
• Experience with agentic development infrastructure and workflows
• Familiarity with data science and analytics tools such as Pyspark, Databricks and Delta Lake, and Hex

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. Our products will power the next wave of innovation in fintech, helping our customers deliver better, more transparent products and services to the consumer.

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Early exercise program
• Extended post-termination exercise period
• 401K for retirement planning
• Hybrid team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated base salary range for this role is between $200,000 and $220,000, and an equity grant.