Principal Core Infrastructure Engineer

About Highnote Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is an embedded finance company that sets the standard in modern card platform management. As an all-in-one card issuer processor and program management platform, we provide digital-first organizations with the flexibility to seamlessly issue and process payment cards, embed virtual and physical card payments, and integrate ledger and wallet functionalities—empowering businesses to drive growth and profitability. We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 140+ employees. Headquartered in San Francisco, we’ve managed to build one of the most advanced payments teams in the industry, with team members in 25+ US states. Operating through our core values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, we’re helping businesses grow for the future by creating the payment products demanded by tomorrow, with the ability to solve for use cases that don’t exist yet. We are fast-moving, hands-on, and strongly believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. We believe we’re unlocking incredible opportunities that can change the future of payments, as long as we have the right people to make it happen. The Opportunity Highnote connects merchants and businesses to the most advanced virtual payments platform, and we are just getting started. Our mission is to help merchants and businesses grow by accelerating their digital transformation with innovative virtual payment products. Our infrastructure will be across multiple continents over the next few years to support the ever growing business needs. The core infrastructure team owns the management of GCP, AWS, and various third party cloud services, including all of compute, storage, networking, container orchestration frameworks, and infrastructure pipeline. You will work in a highly collaborative and fast-changing environment, and play a key role in elevating the organization in every aspect of security, stability, and performance of our services. What you’ll be doing: Collaborate with other teams to build an infrastructure as a platform that is secure, stable, cost-effective, and most importantly, empowers teams to iterate fast Building and maintaining our cloud infrastructure stack and CI/CD pipelines Design and implement monitoring and alerting for the infrastructure What we are looking for: 12+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering or software engineering Strong experience working with GCP or AWS Experience with Kubernetes and/or Istio Experience with one or more scripting/programming languages, preferably Java/Python Ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced and cross-functional environment Strong skills in troubleshooting issues in a highly distributed environment Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (e.g., Claude Code) across the full software development lifecycle - including design, prototyping, development, testing, and iteration. A demonstrated passion for AI-driven development, a commitment to continuously advancing AI skills, and a drive to push the boundaries of productivity and engineering outcomes. Bonus Skills: Experience in the financial payments technology space Expertise in Cloud networking Experience with GCP technologies, such as Spanner, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, etc Experience in building large-scale, distributed systems Why Highnote? We’re a startup that allows for our employees to truly build from the ground up and impact every layer of our organization. We’re a team of payments obsessed individuals. While some of us come from the fintech world, some of us don’t. We value the varied backgrounds and the diverse perspectives of our employees. We’re small on hierarchy and big on growth. We’re a flat organization that allows everyone to have direct exposure to our leadership team. We are looking for builders who thrive in ambiguity. We’re backed by Oak HC/FT, Costanoa Ventures, Adams Street Partners, Westcap, and Pine