Senior Software Engineer, Platform

About the role

Team: Platform Engineering

Location: Portland, Oregon. Full time (hybrid)

Salary range: $132,300-$161,700

Unfortunately, we are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this role at this time.

Platform Engineering Team

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll own the reliability, performance and scalability of the production infrastructure behind every CreativeX product. You'll be a part of the Platform Engineering team, which builds the infrastructure, shared services and self-service tools our engineers rely on, and runs the systems that collect, process and serve the ad data and creative scoring our customers depend on.

We're investing in our core architecture: evolving our data layer, scaling our processing pipelines for higher throughput and automating more of how we process creative assets. You'll lead the database migrations and rearchitecture work that make this possible, and build the tooling that lets other engineers deploy, test and debug.

This is a systems-level role so you'll write code, but most of your impact will come from how our systems are designed, run, observed and scaled. You enjoy taking a system that works and making it faster, more reliable and easier to run, and this role is an opportunity to shape the platform that CreativeX's next stage of growth is built on.

What you will do

• Be the owner and go-to expert for the reliability and performance of our production systems
• Lead database migrations and rearchitecture projects across teams, from planning and risk assessment through cutover, with minimal disruption to customers
• Scale our infrastructure and data processing pipelines to keep pace with growing data volumes and throughput
• Build self-service tools and automation that let engineers deploy, test and debug on their own
• Maintain and improve staging and development environments, deployment automation and testing infrastructure
• Improve observability across our systems, using AI-assisted workflows to cut manual investigation and repetitive operational work
• Respond to production incidents and lead post-incident reviews that result in lasting fixes
• Collaborate with Information Security, Product and the wider engineering team to keep our systems secure and flag feasibility and scalability risks early
• Set and meet reliability and performance targets for the platform

Who you are

• Experience leading a database migration or significant architectural change on a live production system
• Deep, hands-on experience with cloud data platforms in production, including performance tuning and query optimisation
• A track record of scaling existing web applications and the infrastructure behind them, with a strong grounding in observability, monitoring and alerting
• Comfort reading and writing production code, ideally in Ruby on Rails
• Day-to-day use of AI tools such as Claude to build workflows and automation, not only as a search engine
• Clear communication: you explain technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers, and write documentation others can follow
• Experience with a major cloud platform like AWS or DigitalOcean; infrastructure as code (e.g. Ansible); Datadog or similar monitoring
• Nice to have: High-volume data or media pipelines; internal developer platforms or self-service tooling; working within a formal information security programme

In your first 90 days

• You know our production architecture, data layer and deployment pipeline well enough to make changes safely, and you have shipped improvements to production.
• You have assessed our current database setup and agreed a plan with engineering leadership for the first major migration or rearchitecture, including risks, sequencing and rollback.
• You have delivered at least one reliability or observability improvement that other teams notice, such as fixing a noisy alert or replacing a recurring manual request with a self-service tool.

After one year

• You have led at least one major database migration or rearchitecture to completion without unplanned customer-facing downtime.
• Our systems handle higher data volumes and pipeline throughput, and reliability and performance are tracked against agreed targets.
• Engineers across CreativeX use self-service tooling you built to deploy, test or debug, and wait less on the platform team.

Additional information

At CreativeX, we encourage applicants of all backgrounds and identities to apply for roles that align with their own interests and career trajectory. If you fit the description above and see yourself in this role, we would love to see your application!

What we Offer

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision (US) and Private Medical Insurance and Health Cash Plan (UK)
• Generous time off + bank holidays
• Education budget to be used for individual learning experiences or grouped with your team for joint learning
• Annual subscription to Calm and Headspace for your mental wellbeing
• Monthly coaching to talk to a trained professional about career goals, relationships, and personal development
• Competitive salary and commission plan including stock options, as we believe that everyone should have a stake in the business
• 4-month full pay parenting leave for all employees who have been with the company for one (1) year
• Employee contributions to a 401(k) once they have completed their eligibility period

• As part of our commitment to maintaining a safe and secure workplace, CreativeX conducts standard right to work and background checks on all potential employees.
• This process is designed to verify the accuracy of information provided by candidates and to ensure a safe environment for all employees.
• Background checks are conducted via a secure third party application and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.