Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

We saw a problem within the life insurance industry: getting covered took too long, involved too much paperwork, and required too many in-person meetings with sales agents. Having lost his father at a young age, our CEO, Jamie, was determined to make it easier for people to get the coverage they needed to provide for their families. So, we got to work. We developed a method of real-time underwriting leveraging AI and, in doing so, reduced the months-long process of applying for life insurance to minutes. Our digital experience is quick (instant decisions!), loved by users (check out our Trustpilot or Google reviews) and prolific ($74 billion+ in coverage provided).

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to accelerate developer productivity across Ladder's engineering organization. You'll own and modernize our CI/CD pipelines, build systems, and developer tooling - while also contributing to the reliability of our cloud infrastructure and data platform. 

The ideal candidate brings demonstrated experience in software engineering, leadership maturity and a deep understanding of  engineering infrastructure.  This is a remote role based in one of the 22 States Ladder is currently hiring in - AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, KS, MA, MD, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, VA, WA, WI.  Please note, Ladder is not currently sponsoring or transferring OPT or H1-B visa's.

As a senior engineer on the team, you won't just be writing code, you'll be shaping our platform strategy. You will:

• Improve developer velocity across the engineering organization. You'll measure and optimize the inner loop -  how long it takes an engineer to go from code change to confident production deployment. This includes build times, test parallelization, deployment rollout speed, and the tooling engineers interact with every day.
• Shape the architecture of Ladder's production infrastructure. You'll evaluate trade-offs and make high-impact technical decisions — like whether to replace custom monitoring tooling with native cloud provider integrations, or redesign how we rebuild data pipelines when upstream logic changes. You'll be the person who sees the big picture across systems and decides where to invest engineering effort.

• Participate in incident response for infrastructure, run retrospectives, and help drive follow-through on fixes as part of the team.

• Systematically pay down infrastructure tech debt. You'll partner with your team to identify legacy systems that have been superseded by better alternatives and build a roadmap to retire them — migrating from bespoke systems to native integrations, cleaning up remnants of past cloud migrations, and upgrading components that have drifted behind. 
• You'll raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance -  not through formal management, but through the quality and clarity of your technical work.

• A functional programming expert: You have deep production experience with Clojure or another functional language and are excited to work in a Clojure-and-JVM environment. Prior Clojure experience is a strong plus.
• An expert with CI/CD and Build pipelines: You have battle-tested experience profiling and optimizing CI/CD pipelines for large codebases, possess intricate knowledge of monorepo build tools like Bazel and Buck, and know how to solve issues related to build and test slowness.
• An Infrastructure enthusiast: You have extensive experience with cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, Datomic, BigQuery and cloud platforms like GCP.
• A Systems Thinker: You possess a deep understanding of software design and architecture. You don't just patch bugs; you design elegant systems that prevent entire classes of problems.
• A Self Starter: You thrive in ambiguity. You can take a high-level, messy business problem, define the technical constraints, and drive the solution from ideation to deployment.

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years in infrastructure/platform roles
• BS, MS in Computer Science or related technical field a strong plus
• Must-have: Kubernetes, GCP (or equivalent cloud), CI/CD pipeline design, Docker, infrastructure-as-code, JVM operational experience, BigQuery, Kafka
• Strong plus: Clojure, Datomic, Datadog or similar observability platform, monorepo build tools (Buck, Bazel)
• Nice-to-have: Go, Python, Beam/Dataflow,