Platform Engineer

Who We Are

NEXT Ventures is where ambition takes shape and momentum becomes movement. As a global platform revolutionising access to performance-based capital, we empower the world’s most driven individuals to rise. Through our flagship brand, FundedNext, we empower dreamers to become doers, and potential to turn into performance. With 500+ driven minds across five countries, we power a global rhythm — 220,000+ daily users from 170+ nations, each chasing greatness in their own way.

Your Role in Our Mission

As a Platform Engineer at FundedNext, you’ll keep the systems behind a global trading platform fast, reliable, and secure — the infrastructure that 220,000+ daily users depend on without ever thinking about it. Working within our Platform Squad and executing on the architecture your squad lead sets, you’ll own database performance, deployment pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and observability end to end.

This isn’t a ticket-closing role. You profile before you guess, you measure the impact of every fix, and you treat AI agents as a core part of how you ship. When a product squad hits a bottleneck, you’re the person who finds it, fixes it, and makes sure it never happens the same way twice.

How You’ll Make an Impact

Scalability & Performance

• Execute on database optimisation and scaling initiatives — implementing sharding, partitioning, and replication configurations designed by the squad lead, and independently hunting down and fixing slow queries across the platform.

• Build and maintain data archiving pipelines — moving historical trade logs, transaction data, and audit trails from production tables to cold storage while preserving query access for compliance and reporting.

• Run regular performance profiling across FundedNext services — pinpointing bottlenecks in the Laravel backend, Node.js services, and database layers, then shipping measurable fixes.

• Implement and maintain caching strategies (Redis, ElastiCache) — cache invalidation logic, read-through/write-behind patterns, and hit-rate monitoring to keep performance optimal.

• Support load testing and capacity planning — writing load test scripts, analysing results, finding breaking points, and fixing them before traffic growth becomes a production incident.

Reliability & Infrastructure

• Implement and maintain BC/DR infrastructure — multi-AZ deployments, database replicas, backup schedules, and failover triggers; participate in regular DR drills and document recovery procedures.

• Build and maintain the CI/CD pipeline — deployment automation, canary releases, rollback mechanisms, and integration testing that lets every squad deploy at least weekly, safely.

• Manage Docker containerisation and orchestration — writing Dockerfiles, managing container configurations, troubleshooting issues, and keeping development and production environments consistent.

• Maintain and extend the AWS cloud infrastructure — provisioning resources, managing IAM policies, configuring networking (VPCs, security groups, ALBs), and optimising cloud costs under your squad lead’s guidance.

• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability — Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, log aggregation (ELK/OpenSearch), distributed tracing, and alert rules that keep MTTD under 15 minutes.

Security & Cross-Team Support

• Remediate security findings from the Cyber Security Squad — fixing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and audit findings across infrastructure and application layers, then verifying fixes through retesting.

• Contribute to customer-facing FundedNext product engineering when needed — fixing performance bottlenecks, implementing infrastructure-aware features, optimising API endpoints, and offering architectural guidance to product squads.

• Maintain and improve the message queue infrastructure (RabbitMQ, Kafka) — consumer management, dead letter handling, queue monitoring, and reliable async processing across all services.

• Write and maintain infrastructure-as-code — Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent for reproducible, version-controlled provisioning.

• Document runbooks, architecture decisions, and operational procedures — so the platform stays self-documenting and any engineer can respond to incidents with clear guidance.

What You Bring

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure-focused work.

• Strong proficiency in PHP and Laravel — able to diagnose and fix performance bottlenecks, optimise Eloquent queries, implement caching, and understand the application layer deeply enough to make infrastructure decisions that serve it.

• Solid proficiency in Node.js for backend services and Next.js for internal tooling — comfortable across the full stack when product support is needed.

• Strong database skills — query optimisation (EXPLAIN plans, index analysis), replication setup, basic partitioning, and MySQL and/or PostgreSQL experience at moderate-to-high scale.

• Hands-on Docker experience — Dockerfiles, Docker Compose for local development, and a working grasp of container networking and volume management. Kubernetes or ECS is a plus.

• Working knowledge of AWS — EC2, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, ALB, CloudFront, and basic VPC networking. You don’t need to be an AWS architect, but you must be comfortable provisioning and managing resources.

• Experience with at least one message queue system (RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis Streams, or similar) — producer/consumer patterns, message durability, and dead letter handling.

• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) — pipeline stages, automated testing integration, and rollback procedures.

• Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or similar) — dashboards, alert rules, and basic log analysis for incident response.

• A performance-oriented mindset — you notice when a page loads slowly, you profile before guessing, and you measure the impact of your optimisations.

• Good communication skills — able to understand product squads’ infrastructure needs and explain platform constraints clearly.

AI-Native Engineering (Mandatory)

This one is non-negotiable. You must demonstrate active, daily use of modern AI agentic workflows — well beyond basic ChatGPT prompts or Copilot autocomplete. We expect fluency with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or similar), project-level AI configuration (CLAUDE.md, rules files), agentic task delegation, and AI-driven code review. The bar is 5–10x productivity through AI-augmented development. Candidates who are not AI-native in their engineering workflow will not advance.

Your X-Factor

• Experience running container orchestration at scale with Kubernetes or ECS.

• A track record of running real DR drills and failovers — not just configuring them on paper.

• Demonstrable cloud cost-optimisation wins where you cut spend without sacrificing reliability.

• Background building or operating high-throughput, low-latency systems in fintech, trading, or another transaction-heavy domain.

• Open-source contributions to infrastructure, tooling, or developer-experience projects.

• A habit of turning incidents into permanent fixes — postmortems that change the system, not just the runbook.

Your Journey After Applying

• 30-minute HR session with the Talent Acquisition team.

• 60-minute technical session with the Platform Squad Lead (hiring manager).

• Technical assessment — a hands-on infrastructure / system-design exercise.

• Final session with Engineering leadership.

Why Join NEXT

At NEXT Ventures, performance is more than numbers — it’s the pulse that drives innovation and impact. Join us to build and harden the platform that lets a global community of traders perform at their best, every second of every day. Here, infrastructure isn’t a back office — it’s the engine room of the entire business, and the engineers who run it shape how fast we can grow.

Your next chapter in building at scale begins here.