Software Engineer II, Foundation

Platform Engineering at Chainalysis provides the shared infrastructure, tooling, and developer experience layer that powers every engineering team. We are moving away from team-owned infrastructure silos and consolidating onto shared, scalable platform patterns. The Foundation discipline owns the substrate: cloud infrastructure, networking, Kubernetes, streaming, and security primitives.

We are hiring a Software Engineer II to join the Foundation team. Your job is straightforward: build, improve, and operate the infrastructure primitives that every service at Chainalysis depends on — Kubernetes clusters, cloud networking, streaming infrastructure (Kafka / WarpStream), secrets management, IAM, and the reconcilers that make it all self-service and drift-free. This is an infrastructure-focused IC role at the C4 level, typically suited for someone with 3–5 years of experience. You will work alongside senior engineers who will pair with you, review your work, and invest in your growth. You will report to the Senior Manager of Platform Engineering.

In this role, you'll:

• Build and maintain cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP using Terraform — designing the modules and patterns that provision the substrate our services run on, and thinking beyond the immediate use case to how your work is consumed across the organization.
• Operate and evolve multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters (EKS) serving the entire engineering organization — owning node lifecycle, upgrades, security contexts, and networking decisions that affect every team.
• Own the operational side of our streaming infrastructure migration from managed Kafka (MSK) to WarpStream, building and maintaining the tooling that supports it.
• Contribute to platform tooling and reconcilers that underpin our platform contract model — writing Go, working with the Kubernetes API, and building high-quality self-service primitives that engineering teams rely on to declare what their services need.
• Design and maintain foundational networking and security infrastructure — transit gateways, GCP interconnect, ingress, security groups, IAM policies, and IRSA — getting the invisible plumbing right so nobody has to think about it.
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive operational excellence — responding to infrastructure incidents, writing and improving runbooks, and feeding every incident pattern back into automation so the same class of issue never repeats.

We're looking for candidates who have:

• 3+ years of software engineering or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services (EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, VPC, or similar) — we’re looking for people who have built and operated real infrastructure, not certifications.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes in production — you have operated or deployed workloads on K8s clusters beyond a local environment.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform strongly preferred; Pulumi or CloudFormation acceptable).
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Python, or shell scripting — Go is preferred because our reconciler work is in Go, but you should be ready to turn your hand to whatever the problem demands.
• Comfort with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Argo, Jenkins, or similar) and hands-on experience with on-call and incident response — you understand what it means to be accountable for production systems.

You might also have:

• Experience building Kubernetes operators or controllers — CRDs, reconcilers, and the controller-runtime library.
• Familiarity with streaming infrastructure (Kafka, WarpStream, or similar event-driven systems) or depth in networking (VPCs, transit gateways, ingress controllers, DNS, load balancing, and security groups).
• Experience in regulated environments (SOC 2, ISO-27001, or similar compliance frameworks) or familiarity with GitOps patterns (ArgoCD, Flux).
• A passion for platform engineering as leverage — you care about making other engineers more productive, and when you see toil, your instinct is to eliminate it.

Technologies we use:

• Languages: Go, Python, Bash/Shell, HCL (Terraform).
• Cloud: AWS (EC2, EKS, IAM, S3, VPC, Lambda), GCP.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform.
• Kubernetes: EKS, Helm, CRDs, controller-runtime.
• Streaming: Kafka, WarpStream (migrating from MSK).
• Networking: Transit Gateway, GCP Interconnect, Ingress Controllers, DNS, Security Groups.
• Identity & Security: IAM, IRSA, Secrets Management.
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions.
• GitOps: ArgoCD, Flux.

AI at Chainalysis is not a feature - it is a new way of working. One that turns instructions into work done, and helps us move faster than the threats we're built to counter, and we expect our employees to take ownership of the output and ensure quality.

About Chainalysis: Chainalysis is the blockchain data platform, making it easy to connect the movement of digital assets to real-world services. Powered by deep blockchain data and AI, organizations can investigate illicit activity, manage risk exposure, and develop innovative market solutions built on the industry's most trusted blockchain intelligence. Our mission is to build trust in blockchains, blending safety and security with an unwavering commitment to growth and innovation.

You belong here. At Chainalysis, we believe that diversity of experience and thought makes us stronger. With both customers and employees around the world, we are committed to ensuring our team reflects the unique communities around us. We’re ensuring we keep learning by committing to continually revisit and reevaluate our diversity culture.

We encourage applicants across any race, ethnicity, gender/gender expression, age, spirituality, ability, experience and more. If you need any accommodations to make our interview process more accessible to you due to a disability, don't hesitate to let us know.

We can’t wait to meet you.