Director Infrastructure - Remote US

Earnest's mission is to make higher education accessible and affordable for everyone. We empower past, present, and soon-to-be students to maximize their financial futures through thoughtful guidance and impactful products.
We build tools that help people feel in control of their financial future, including:

Private student loans - low rates, people-first service, and flexible payments.
Student loan refinancing - break free from high interest rates or monthly payments.
Scholarships - access to thousands of scholarships to help students pay less.
The Director of Infrastructure will report to the Chief Technology Officer.
As the Director of Infrastructure, you will:

Work closely with the CTO to assess the current and long-term infrastructure, cloud operations, and developer productivity needs and develop a comprehensive strategy and long-term roadmap centered around automation and infrastructure-as-code
Partner with the CTO and engineering leadership to develop a strategy around new technology adoption, upgrades, and technical design reviews
Be responsible for the timely delivery of high-quality work aligned with the longer-term infrastructure roadmap and strategy and in support of the remainder of the product development team and the broader organization
Direct the creation and deployment of observability, monitoring and alerting tools adhering to the industry standards to achieve a faster time to detection and resolution of issues
Partner with the Security and Compliance department to ensure cloud security issues, vulnerabilities, and non-compliance issues are identified, tracked, and resolved.
Lead, inspire, and develop team members
Your Impact:

Develop and lead a modern, high-impact infrastructure engineering team based on building self-service tooling and site reliability engineering practices
Design and manage an efficient, talented, and responsive organization
Drive forward a culture of limiting cost waste with a broader perspective and focus on efficiency
About You:

10+ years of progressive experience in software technologies
5+ years of direct experience leading and managing infrastructure or devops teams
5+ years of direct experience running a production environment
Excellent oral, written, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with project and application development teams, management, and clients
Technical understanding of cloud management concepts, principles, and industry best practices
Hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Experience crafting and managing on-call rotations, incident management, and postmortem practices
Experience in writing and developing policies, procedures, standards, and guidelines is required
Strong business/relevant industry acumen with the ability to build strong customer relationships across various levels of the company
Even Better:

Experience owning and scaling cloud infrastructure, developer productivity tools, CI/CD process, and site reliability engineering practice to create a self-service infrastructure
About Us:

What makes an 'Earnie' culture:

Drivers - Drivers are satisfied by making things happen, not coming along for the ride. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from themselves and others.
Humility - Humble team players check their egos and consider the team's needs above their own. They are self-aware of their strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Growth Mindset - People with a growth mindset approach challenges and failures as learning opportunities. They seek feedback to improve, give feedback to others, and genuinely want to perform well.
Earnies are committed to helping students live their best lives, free from the stress of student debt. If you're as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let's build something great together!
Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits, including:

Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
Work anywhere in the U.S.
Mac computers + work from home stipend to set up your home office
Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
RSUs
401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
Robust tuition reimbursement program
$1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world
Competitive days of annual PTO
Annual 'my day'
Competitive parental leave
Plenty of Earnest swag, optional in person team gatherings, picnics, celebrations, and plenty of fun virtual events
At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.
Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.
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A little about our pay philosophy:
We take pride in compensating our employees fairly and equitably. We are showcasing a range of your potential base salary, determined primarily based on a candidate's location. Earnest takes a market-based approach, categorizing U.S. locations into one of five zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate's starting pay will also be determined based on job-related qualifications, internal compensation, and budget. This range may be modified in the future.
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