Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer

ABOUT UPBOUND

Upbound Group, Inc. (effective February 27, 2023: NASDAQ: UPBD) is an omni-channel platform company committed to elevating financial opportunity for all through innovative, inclusive, and technology-driven financial solutions that address the evolving needs and aspirations of consumers. The Company’s customer-facing operating units include industry-leading brands such as Acima, Rent-A-Center, and Brigit that facilitate consumer transactions across a wide range of store-based and digital retail channels, including over 2,400 company branded retail units across the United States, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Upbound Group, Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas.

JOB SUMMARY

The Platform Engineer II is a lead individual contributor responsible for driving the development, maintenance, and evolution of the company's Internal Developer Platform, cloud infrastructure, identity services, event-driven architecture, and AI-powered engineering capabilities.

This individual leads the design and implementation of scalable platform solutions across cloud environments, establishes engineering standards and best practices, and serves as a key technical advisor to engineering teams. The role partners closely with Development, Security, Architecture, and DevEx teams to improve developer productivity, platform reliability, and software delivery velocity.

A significant focus of this role is building and operating AI-powered platform capabilities, including LLM-based automation, agentic workflows, retrieval systems, and developer experience enhancements integrated throughout the SDLC. The engineer will also drive enterprise adoption of modern identity platforms and event-driven architectures supporting both customer-facing and internal engineering systems.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Platform Engineering

• Lead the design, implementation, and management of scalable, highly available, and secure platform services across AWS and GCP.

• Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) adoption through reusable Terraform modules, automation frameworks, and platform standards.

• Architect and implement advanced CI/CD pipelines leveraging GitOps principles, progressive delivery, and engineering automation.

• Design and operate platform observability solutions encompassing monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and SLO management.

• Provide expert-level troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for critical platform incidents.

• Mentor engineers and establish engineering best practices across development and platform teams.

Developer Experience & Internal Platforms

• Design and evolve the Internal Developer Platform, including developer self-service capabilities, platform APIs, golden path templates, service scaffolding, and Developer Portal experiences.

• Define and measure platform adoption through DORA metrics, developer productivity metrics, and platform usage analytics.

• Build reusable platform services, SDKs, APIs, CLIs, and automation frameworks that improve engineering efficiency.

Identity & Security Platforms

• Design, implement, and operate enterprise identity services supporting workforce, customer, and machine-to-machine authentication.

• Partner with security teams to implement authentication, authorization, federation, RBAC, and governance standards.

• Lead adoption and operational excellence of identity platforms including Keycloak and Entra ID.

Event-Driven Architecture

• Design and operate Kafka-based messaging and event streaming platforms.

• Establish platform standards for event-driven architecture, schema management, resiliency patterns, and event governance.

• Partner with application teams to build scalable asynchronous architectures utilizing event streaming technologies.

AI Platform Engineering

• Design, build, and operate AI-powered platform services integrated into the software development lifecycle.

• Develop RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and agent-based workflows that interact with enterprise systems such as GitHub, Jira, Confluence, CI/CD systems, and observability platforms.

• Implement MCP-based integrations and AI tooling that enable safe and efficient automation of engineering workflows.

• Build AI-powered developer experiences including engineering copilots, automation assistants, deployment assistants, and developer productivity tooling.

• Design guardrails, evaluation frameworks, approval workflows, and observability solutions for AI systems.

• Instrument and monitor AI applications using metrics for latency, token usage, retrieval quality, hallucination rates, user feedback, and operational effectiveness.

REQUIRED SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

• 6+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Software Engineering.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, or operating AI/LLM-powered solutions.

• Strong software engineering background with experience designing and building production applications, APIs, services, or developer tooling.

• Proficiency in Python, Go, or equivalent programming languages used for platform and automation development.

• Deep expertise with AWS and/or GCP cloud platforms.

• Expert knowledge of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native infrastructure patterns.

• Expert-level experience with Terraform and infrastructure automation.

• Extensive experience implementing advanced CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.

Identity & Security

• Hands-on experience with Keycloak, Entra ID, Auth0, or comparable identity platforms.

• Strong understanding of OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SAML, JWTs, RBAC, and enterprise identity architectures.

Event Streaming

• Production experience operating Kafka or enterprise event-streaming platforms.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, event-driven architecture, consumer scalability, partitioning, replication, resiliency patterns, and schema governance.

AI & Developer Productivity

• Experience designing and deploying RAG-based solutions.

• Understanding of embeddings, vector databases, semantic search, prompt engineering, and context retrieval techniques.

• Experience building AI agents, tool-calling frameworks, or agentic workflows.

• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs with engineering workflows, source control platforms, ticketing systems, or operational tooling.

• Experience implementing MCP server integrations or equivalent AI tool integration frameworks.

• Experience evaluating, monitoring, and improving AI system performance in production environments.

• Understanding of AI governance, guardrails, validation strategies, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

PREFERRED SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience productionizing agentic systems with permissions, auditability, rollback strategies, failure handling, and human approval workflows.

• Experience integrating AI systems across multiple enterprise engineering platforms, such as GitHub, Jira, ServiceNow, Confluence, and Backstage, in a governed production environment.

• Familiarity with LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agent Framework, or similar orchestration frameworks.

• Experience building automated AI evaluation pipelines, benchmark datasets, regression tests, and continuous quality feedback loops.

• Experience building Backstage-based or equivalent Developer Portals with catalog ownership, software templates, scorecards, and adoption metrics.

• Experience using engineering productivity data to identify platform friction, prioritize improvements, and measure developer experience outcomes.

• Experience supporting regulated environments and security compliance frameworks.

COMPENSATION/BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation

• Full health benefits-Medical/Dental/Vision

• 401(k) match, (5%/4%)

• DTO (discretionary time off)

• Health savings account (HSA) with company contribution

• College tuition reimbursement program (STEM degrees)

• Unlimited use of LinkedIn Learning

• On-site gym and showers

• Free car charging and covered parking

SPONSORSHIP

Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time.