Senior/Staff Platform Engineer

About Addi

We are a leading financial platform, building the future of payments, shopping, and banking—a world where consumers and merchants can transact effortlessly and grow together. Today, we serve over 3.6 million customers and partner with more than 55,000 merchants, making Addi Colombia’s fastest-growing marketplace.

With a state-of-the-art, technology-first approach, we provide banking solutions (deposits, payments, unsecured credit) and commerce services (e-commerce, marketing), bridging the financial gap for millions and redefining how people experience financial freedom. As the country’s leading Buy Now, Pay Later provider, we have secured regulatory approval to operate as a bank, unlocking even greater opportunities for our customers. In the past year, we have also achieved profitability, reinforcing the strength of our business model and our ability to scale sustainably.

Our mission has earned the trust of world-class investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Architect Capital, GIC, Goldman Sachs, Greycroft, Monashees, Notable Capital, Quona Capital, Union Square Ventures, Victory Park Capital, and more, who back our vision for the future. With their support, we are not just growing—we are transforming Latin America’s financial ecosystem and shaping the next generation to shop, pay, and bank in Colombia.

But what truly sets us apart is how we build. We are a conscious company, driven by deep experience in scaling technology, services and products, and we live by our values every day.

About the Role

This is where you come in. Below, you’ll find what this role is all about—the impact you’ll drive, the challenges you’ll tackle, and what it takes to thrive at Addi. If you’re ready to be part of something big, keep reading.

What’s the mission you’ll drive

To design and operate the internal engineering platform that makes every developer at Addi radically more productive — delivering a frictionless build, test, and observability experience that abstracts infrastructure complexity away from product teams, enabling them to ship high-quality software faster and with greater confidence across our transformation into Latin America's leading financial platform.

What you will do

• Compress p95 CI pipeline execution times by 40% within the first 12 months by implementing advanced build caching, parallelization, and incremental compilation strategies tailored to our Java/JVM ecosystem , resulting in a highly optimized developer feedback loop that minimizes context switching and maximizes daily safe deployments per squad.

• Deliver 100% automated SLO dashboard instrumentation and alert policy coverage for all newly launched and active platform services within the first 6 months by embedding automated tracking and error-budget enforcement mechanisms directly into the core platform layer, resulting in product squads seamlessly owning their own operational reliability and shifting on-call accountability closer to code generation.

• Establish zero platform-team dependency for production performance triage within the first 9 months by operating and standardizing an integrated, continuous observability solution (covering CPU, heap, and thread profiling) across all production JVM services, resulting in product developers independently identifying and resolving application hotspots without escalating tickets to the Platform or SRE teams.

• Drive a measurable reduction in platform support ticket volume per developer within the first 12 months by shipping native AI-assisted capabilities—specifically automated runbook generation, LLM-based log triage in the developer portal, and compliant service scaffolding—resulting in a highly scalable platform ecosystem where developers get immediate, context-aware operational answers without growing engineering headcount.

What we’re looking for

• Deep Expertise in Software Architecture & the JVM Ecosystem

  • 3–5 years of professional experience building or operating platforms that serve Java/JVM-based backend systems at scale.

  • Strong software architecture fundamentals: understands distributed system tradeoffs, service boundaries, API design, and data consistency patterns — not just the infrastructure layer.

  • Hands-on proficiency with the JVM internals relevant to production operations: garbage collection tuning, classloading, thread modeling, heap analysis, and JIT behavior.

  • Comfortable reading and reasoning about Java application code to diagnose performance issues — bridges the gap between software engineer and infrastructure engineer.

• Proven Track Record Building Internal Developer Platforms

  • Demonstrated experience designing and delivering developer-facing platforms (service catalogs, golden-path templates, scaffolding tooling) that measurably improved engineering autonomy.

  • Deep expertise in CI/CD systems, not just configuring pipelines but optimizing them: remote caching, test parallelization, flakiness detection, and incremental build strategies.

  • Experience instrumenting and reporting on Developer Experience (DX) metrics: DORA metrics, build time percentiles, pipeline reliability rates, and time-to-first-deployment for new services.

  • Treats the internal platform as a product, with internal developer teams as customers — conducts discovery, measures adoption, and iterates based on developer feedback.

• Observability Engineering — Building the Stack.

  • Expert-level hands-on experience with the full observability stack: metrics (Prometheus/Grafana), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Tempo/Jaeger), structured logging, and continuous profiling.

  • Designs and maintains the pipelines, SDKs, and platform integrations that make it trivially easy for product teams to instrument their own services.

  • Deep familiarity with SLO/SLI frameworks: defines error budget policies, configures multi-window burn rate alerts, and coaches squads on reliability ownership.

  • Experience with continuous profiling tools in production JVM environments (e.g., async-profiler, Pyroscope, or equivalent) and the ability to translate flame graphs into actionable code-level fixes.

• Operating Systems & Infrastructure Foundations

  • Strong Linux fundamentals: process scheduling, memory management, file descriptors, networking stack, and cgroups/namespaces as they relate to container and JVM behavior.

  • Understands container runtime behavior (Docker, containerd) and Kubernetes scheduling deeply enough to tune resource allocation, JVM heap sizing, and startup probes for Java workloads.

• Strong Systematic Problem Solving & Engineering Judgment

  • Applies a structured, data-driven methodology to diagnose complex issues across the build, runtime, and infrastructure stack — moves from symptoms to root cause without guesswork.

  • Exercises sound architectural judgment: knows when to build vs. adopt, and can argue both sides rigorously using data and first-principles reasoning.

  • Proactively identifies and eliminates toil — measures the cost of manual work, proposes automation, and follows through to delivery.

  • Communicates technical findings clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, with the ability to translate platform complexity into business impact.

• Developer-First Mindset & Culture Multiplier

  • Approaches every platform decision through the lens of developer experience — actively solicits feedback from product squads and treats friction as a bug.

  • Early adopter of AI-assisted engineering workflows, with demonstrated experience integrating LLM tooling into developer workflows beyond personal productivity (e.g., team-level tooling, automated documentation, or AI-assisted diagnostics).

  • Acts as a force multiplier: mentors product engineers on platform capabilities, architectural patterns, and observability ownership — reducing dependency on the platform team over time.

  • Communicates effectively across distributed, cross-functional teams in a fast-moving environment.

Why join us?

• Work on a problem that truly matters – We are redefining how people shop, pay, and bank in Colombia, breaking down financial barriers and empowering millions. Your work will directly impact customers' lives by creating more accessible, seamless, and fair financial services.

• Be part of something big from the ground up – This is your chance to help shape a company, influencing everything from our technology and strategy to our culture and values. You won’t just be an employee—you’ll be an owner

• Unparalleled growth opportunity – The market we’re tackling is massive, and we’re growing faster than almost any fintech lender at our stage. If you’re looking for a high-impact role in a company that’s scaling fast, this is it.

• Join a world-class team – Work alongside top-tier talent from around the world, in an environment where excellence, ownership, and collaboration are at the core of everything we do. We care deeply about what we build and how we build it—and we want you to be a part of it.

• Competitive compensation & meaningful ownership – We believe in rewarding our talent. You’ll receive a generous salary, equity in the company, and benefits that go beyond the basics to support your growth.

How the hiring process looks like

We believe in a fast, transparent, and engaging hiring experience that allows both you and us to determine if there's a great fit. Here’s what our process looks like:

• Step 1: People Interview (30 min)
  A conversation with a recruiter or hiring manager to get to know you, your experience, and what you're looking for. We’ll also share more about Addi, our culture, and the role.

• Step 2: Initial Interview (60 min)
  A more in-depth conversation with our Head of Cybersecurity, where we explore your skills, experience, and problem-solving approach. We want to understand how you think and work.

• Step 3: Case Study (3-5 Days)
  You may receive a real-world challenge or case study to complete. This is a chance to showcase your expertise and how you approach key problems relevant to the role.

• Step 4: Co-Founder Interview
  If there’s a strong match, you’ll have a final conversation with our Founder to align on expectations, cultural fit and ensure mutual excitement. From there, we’ll move quickly to an offer and discuss next steps.

We value efficiency and respect for your time, so we aim to complete the process as quickly as possible. Our goal is to make this experience insightful and exciting for you, just as much as it is for us. Regardless of the outcome, we are committed to always providing feedback, ensuring that you walk away with valuable insights from your experience with us.