Platform Software Engineer

Avant is looking for a Platform Software Engineer to help shape the future of our financial technology platform and who thrives at the intersection of application development and platform thinking. This is not a pure infrastructure role—you’ll work at the application layer, building the shared patterns, libraries, tooling, and standards that every engineering team at Avant relies on.

You’ll bring a cross-platform mindset: comfortable navigating a large Ruby on Rails monolith one day, designing shared service patterns the next, and defining observability standards or governance frameworks in between. You care about making other engineers more productive and see your success reflected in the success of the teams you enable.

This role reports to the Director of Application Platform & Developer Experience and contributes directly to reducing cognitive load, improving monolith reliability, and raising the engineering quality baseline across the organization.

What you’ll do at Avant

Monolith Stewardship & Developer Experience

• Improve code health, reliability, and developer experience within the avant-basic monolith (Ruby on Rails) during its incremental decomposition

• Drive test suite reliability and performance—reducing flakiness, improving runtime, and restoring engineer confidence that green CI means safe to merge

• Implement and evangelize structured logging, tracing, and observability standards across monolith code paths

• Identify and reduce technical debt in high-risk, high-change areas of the codebase

• Contribute to Ruby, Rails, and Sidekiq upgrade readiness by evaluating changesets and resolving known incompatibilities

Shared Platform & Backbone Services

• Build and maintain shared application services used across domains (notifications, configuration, feature flagging, shared middleware and SDKs)

• Design and implement golden path service templates and patterns for communication between the monolith and decomposed services

• Own application-level integration patterns for shared vendors (observability platforms, workflow engines like Temporal)

• Refactor shared libraries to remove domain-specific coupling and introduce versioning and compatibility policies

Developer Tooling & Productivity

• Build CLI utilities, quality automation (linters, formatters, checks), and test data generation frameworks

• Improve local development and pre-production feedback loops—faster targeted test runs, streamlined build flows, standardized local setups

• Codify and maintain engineering standards and practices: language, framework, repository, branching, and release conventions

Engineering Governance & Communication

• Contribute to the Architecture Guild and Software Engineering Roundtable by facilitating design reviews and documenting architectural decisions as ADRs

• Help centralize and maintain engineering standards, decision records, and guidelines in a discoverable, maintained engineering playbook

• Partner with PIE, Security, and Data & AI on cross-cutting initiatives that require coordination across team boundaries

Why you’re a fit at Avant

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful time spent in production systems at scale

• Strong proficiency in Ruby on Rails, including experience with large monolithic codebases, background job frameworks (Sidekiq), and Rails upgrade paths

• Strong proficiency in Python or willing to learn as required

• Demonstrated cross-platform mindset: you’ve worked across multiple parts of a tech stack (backend services, shared libraries, CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling) rather than staying in a single domain

• Experience improving developer experience or building internal tools, shared libraries, or platform capabilities that other engineers consume

• Solid understanding of observability concepts (structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing) and experience implementing them in production

• Strong communication and documentation skills—you write clearly, document decisions, and can explain tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Comfort working across team boundaries, influencing without authority, and partnering with infrastructure, security, and product teams

• Experience with monolith decomposition or incremental modernization strategies

• Familiarity with test suite optimization, flaky test remediation, or CI/CD pipeline performance improvements

• Experience defining or contributing to engineering standards, RFCs, ADRs, or governance frameworks

• Background in fintech, financial services, or regulated environments where reliability and compliance are critical

• Experience with database reliability concepts (data archival, retention strategies, migration safety)

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, or cloud-native patterns (AWS preferred)—not to own them, but to collaborate effectively with infrastructure teams

This role is based on our downtown Chicago Office, located in the Merchandise Mart. We highly value collaboration and our hybrid schedule (M, T, Th in-office) enables flexibility to balance work and individual priorities.

Compensation Range:

The base salary range for this job is USD $120,000 - USD $150,000/ Year

Employees new to Avant typically come in below the midpoint of the pay range. The compensation range is based on the level outlined in the job posting, and compensation decisions are dependent on each applicant's experience, skills and abilities. 

[If an outstanding applicant's experience and skill level is above or below the qualifications outlined in the job posting, we reserve the right to make an offer at a different level than the one listed in this job posting, which may have a different compensation range.]

This role is eligible for additional incentives, including an annual bonus. These rewards are allocated based on level, impact and performance in the role.

Our benefits include:

• Choice of great Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance Plan options

• 401(k) match

• Flexible Time Off

• Flexible Work Environment - (i.e. Mon/Tues/Thurs in-person)

• Generous Paid Parental Leave, Adoption Assistance and Post-parental leave ramp-up program 

• Lunch Allowance (Fooda) and In-office Snacks

• Summer Fridays 

• Fun In-Office and Virtual Social Events

• And who doesn’t love the swag

Check out our Avant Blog!

We believe that a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences helps us create the most innovative solutions for our customers. We invite you to apply to our positions even if you do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed in the description. If you’re passionate about our mission and aligned to our values, we hope you’ll come contribute to our awesome culture.

Why Avant is the place for you:

At Avant, we believe our values make a difference:

Authenticity. We show up to work as our whole selves and make sure others can too.

Collaboration. We can only succeed when we do so as a team.

Problem-Solving. The harder the problem, the more satisfying the solution.

Customer. We are all owners of the customer experience.

Initiative. Plan. Adapt. Get Sh!t Done.

We believe that great ideas come from anyone and anywhere, that everyone is an owner who drives change, and that we have more fun when we work together. We're problem solvers who love collaborating with intelligent and highly-motivated people to reshape the face of digital banking. Avant offers terrific perks and benefits, fun social events with employees who actually like hanging out together, and a flexible growth environment where trying your hand at new projects and being the active owner of your career path is encouraged and supported.

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