Job Description

Job Title: Lead Platform Engineer (.Net / Azure)

Location: Mexico

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Contact: Chief of Staff

Submissions: Please submit your application in English

___________________________________________________________________________________

Overview

Altai is an exciting, venture-capital funded, scale-up business in the Entertainment Sector. Our platform provides a fully integrated solution for those in the business of casting roles in film, TV, theatre, advertising and other forms of production.

We launched in Australia / New Zealand in December 2022, and in Mexico in October 2024. In the next 12 months we will consolidate our position in our existing markets and continue our global roll out.

We currently have a full time team of 11 people across Australia, Mexico and Sri Lanka, plus a number of fractional domain experts.

About the candidate

We're looking for an experienced software engineer to, primarily, help us transform our infrastructure in preparation for global expansion. Once this is in good shape, activity will shift towards feature development while continuing to take ongoing ownership for the health of the platform.

The successful candidate will be our second hire in Mexico, and will help us grow an expansive and growing platform. We're looking for someone with the technical acumen and entrepreneurial spirit to help us positively disrupt the industry that we love.

Cultural fit is all important. You'll be engaging with the founding team on a daily basis, providing technical advice and guidance during planning activities and then regularly deploying new features. Our values include having a deep respect for diverse points of view, with clear communication driving high performance under pressure. 

Key responsibilities

• Infrastructure Modernisation: Lead the transformation of our current infrastructure to a Terraform-managed, secure-by-design architecture optimised for cost, performance, and scalability
• Security Architecture: Design and implement enterprise-grade security controls including network segmentation, WAF deployment, and compliance frameworks
• Global Scaling Strategy: Architect multi-region infrastructure solutions that support international expansion while maintaining performance and compliance
• Deployment Excellence: Enhance our release processes to enable frequent, reliable deployments with zero downtime and easy rollbacks
• Software development: Once the underlying infrastructure is ready for our growth, focus will shift towards feature development
• Strategic Advisory: Provide ongoing technical leadership and architectural guidance to support business growth and scaling decisions
• Infrastructure Operations: Maintain system reliability, performance monitoring, and cost optimisation across all environments

Qualifications - Mandatory

• .Net Expertise: We're looking for someone with 8+ years .Net software development experience, including 1-2 in a Lead Role.
• Azure Expertise: 4+ years experience architecting and managing Azure cloud infrastructure at scale, including Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform
• Cloudflare Experience: Hands-on experience with Cloudflare for DNS, security, CDN, and global load balancing
• Security Architecture: Proven experience designing secure, compliant cloud architectures with proper network segmentation
• CI/CD Pipeline Design: Experience building robust deployment pipelines supporting blue/green deployments and automated rollbacks
• Multi-Region Architecture: Experience planning and implementing multi-region cloud deployments
• Startup Environment: Understanding of resource constraints and ability to balance speed vs. security in scale-up environments
• Multi-lingual: Candidates must be based in Mexico, and speak excellent English and Spanish

Qualifications - Highly Desired

• Experience using the third party technologies outlined below
• Experience with Next JS and X-State
• Experience using distributed caching solutions such as Redis
• SQL/MySQL Server management experience

Our platform

Our back end platform is built in .Net 6/C# hosted on Azure, with a CI/CD Pipeline deploying code stored in Git hosted by Azure DevOps to staging and production environments. The front end web application is built using Next JS/React utilising MUI/MaterialUI components, leveraging an X-State State Machine for the data layer in the front end, which handles all of the service calls. To date we have enjoyed 100% uptime since launch.

Our platform integrates with the following third party services:

• Firebase (for authentication, but we're exploring moving to another third party for this)
• Stripe (for payments)
• Vimeo (for video hosting, but again we're assessing a change)
• Getstream (for notifications)
• Twilio Sendgrid (for email)
• Amazon Rekognition (for image moderation)
• Zendesk (for customer service)

The successful candidates will have expertise in the following technologies:

• High level of expertise in .Net/C# with multiple enterprise solutions in market, with a focus on performance (e.g. rapid server response time)
• Domain driven design
• Microservices architecture
• API development and orchestration
• Architectural principles such as Containerisation
• Cloud expertise in Azure, including deployment and management of various Azure resources such as App Services, Functions, Blob/Queue Storage and Virtual Databases
• Experience with React
• Deployment techniques, including CI/CD pipelines leveraging github

How we work

• We believe in giving developers time and space to do their best work - we mostly work from home, keep meetings to a minimum, and we use tools such as Slack, Notion and Zoom to communicate and manage the program of work. We believe in the Agile manifesto.
• You'll be the first technical hire in the Mexican / Pacific timezone, and would therefore be needed to provide technical support to our customer support manager (and other staff who spend time in this timezone) outside Australian office hours.
• During the interview process you'll have a chance to talk to the engineers who built the platform - they'll tell you that we respect office hours, but there is occasionally the need to work during the evening and at weekends. We all look to keep this to a minimum.