Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Kindred is a members-only home swapping platform that lets renters and owners exchange primary residences with trusted peers, making a travel-rich lifestyle affordable. Since launching in 2022 it has grown to a global community of 300,000 members across 150+ cities, positioning home swapping as a genuine third option alongside short-term rentals and hotels.

The company has raised over $150M from Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, Caffeinated Capital, Elad Gil, and founders of Opendoor, Figma and ClassPass. Its co-founders came from the early team at Opendoor. Kindred has been covered in both Forbes and The New York Times.

The role

Kindred is looking for a platform engineer with real depth in cloud infrastructure, DevOps and backend systems. The framing is a thought partner rather than a ticket-taker — someone motivated by building the infrastructure that powers a consumer product at scale.

What you'll do

• Serving as infrastructure lead and owning key decisions across cloud architecture, platform strategy, deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code
• Designing, building and maintaining scalable AWS infrastructure that supports rapid product development
• Developing internal tools, automation and backend services that improve developer productivity and operational efficiency
• Working directly with engineering and data teams so infrastructure meets current needs while scaling for growth
• Establishing infrastructure best practices and mentoring engineers on cloud architecture, observability and operational excellence

You may be a right fit if you

• Have 5+ years in platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps or SRE roles
• Have deep hands-on AWS experience — EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, VPC, IAM
• Have strong coding skills in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or similar, and have built internal tools, automation scripts and infrastructure services
• Have implemented and managed CI/CD pipelines, containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code with Terraform or CloudFormation
• Know observability tooling, monitoring, logging and incident response
• Have led infrastructure initiatives and made critical architectural decisions before
• Have worked at a high-growth stage company
• Treat engineering as the client, seeing infrastructure as an enabler of innovation rather than a gatekeeper
• Can balance cost, performance, security and velocity in difficult tradeoffs
• Are comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity
• Take a pragmatic approach — not dogmatic, and able to choose the right tool for the job

Benefits — and the ones that matter here

• Competitive cash compensation and equity
• Comprehensive health benefits
• Flexible time off, plus 12 paid holidays a year
• 21 credits per year to stay in Kindred homes
• $4,000 annual travel stipend
• Remote-first and remote-flexible working, with opportunities to work from anywhere and gather in person, including at Kindred HQ in San Francisco
• Regular team and company offsites

Those two travel benefits are worth pausing on. This is a company whose product exists to let people live in more than one place, and the benefits package reflects that rather than contradicting it — 21 stays a year in member homes plus $4,000 toward travel costs is unusual even among remote-first employers.

Level and compensation

Kindred notes that its openings may span more than one career level, and that the base salary offered depends on experience, transferable skills, business needs, impact and market data. No figures are published.

Location — one honest caveat

The listing describes a "remote-first and remote-flexible work environment, with opportunities to work from anywhere," and Kindred HQ is in San Francisco.

No eligible-country list appears anywhere in the posting, and the equal opportunity statement references US federal, state and local laws alongside "the laws of the country or jurisdiction where you work" — which leaves the door open without confirming it.

If you are outside the United States, confirm geographic eligibility with Kindred before investing significant time in the process.