Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Description

About CreativeX

CreativeX is building the system of creative control for an AI-first marketing world. As AI changes how content is made, evaluated and distributed, the world's biggest brands need a trusted way to bring consistency, intelligence and governance to their creative at scale.

For more than a decade, we've helped brands including Google, PepsiCo, Heineken and P&G power every creative decision with data. Our platform combines machine learning with expert human review to turn ad creative into structured data, so marketers can see what works, prove its impact on sales and brand, and improve it across markets and platforms.

About the Role

Every CreativeX product runs on infrastructure our Platform Engineering team owns, from ingesting ad creative at scale to serving the creative scoring our customers rely on. As a Senior Software Engineer on that team, you'll own the reliability, performance and scalability of our production infrastructure. That means designing, operating and evolving the systems themselves, not only running code on top of them.

We're investing in our core architecture: evolving our data layer, scaling the infrastructure that runs our processing pipelines and automating more of how we operate. You'll lead the database migrations and rearchitecture work that make this possible, and build the tooling that lets other engineers deploy, test and debug on their own. You'll write production code, but most of your impact will come from how our systems are designed, run, observed and scaled.

We're looking for a change agent. You challenge the status quo, you look at a system that works and want to make it faster, more reliable and easier to run, and you bring other teams along with you. This is an opportunity to shape the platform that CreativeX's next stage of growth is built on.

You'll be responsible for the reliability and performance of our production systems, database migrations and rearchitecture, the scaling and observability of our infrastructure, and the self-service tooling our engineers use every day.

Responsibilities

• Reliability and incident response
• Own, and be the go-to expert for, the reliability and performance of our production systems
• Set and meet reliability and performance targets for the platform
• Respond to production incidents and lead post-incident reviews that result in lasting fixes. We don't have a formal on-call rotation yet (it's coming), so we expect flexibility when incidents happen
• Database migrations and rearchitecture
• Lead database migrations and rearchitecture projects across teams, from planning and risk assessment through cutover and rollback, with minimal disruption to customers
• Infrastructure scaling and observability
• Scale the infrastructure that runs our data processing pipelines, keeping it reliable and performant as data volumes and throughput grow
• Improve observability, monitoring and alerting across our systems, using AI-assisted workflows to cut manual investigation and repetitive operational work
• Developer platform and tooling
• Build self-service tools and automation that let engineers deploy, test and debug on their own
• Maintain and improve staging and development environments, deployment automation and testing infrastructure
• Security and cross-team partnership
• Collaborate with Information Security, Product and the wider engineering team to keep our systems secure and flag feasibility and scalability risks early
• Where you'll make an impact in the first 90 days:
• Learn our production architecture, data layer and deployment pipeline well enough to make changes safely, and ship improvements to production
• Assess our current database setup and agree a plan with engineering leadership for the first major migration or rearchitecture, including risks, sequencing and rollback
• Deliver at least one reliability or observability improvement that other teams notice, such as fixing a noisy alert or replacing a recurring manual request with a self-service tool
• Where you'll make an impact in the first year:
• Lead at least one major database migration or rearchitecture to completion without unplanned customer-facing downtime
• Scale our infrastructure to handle higher data volumes and pipeline throughput, with reliability and performance tracked against agreed targets
• Launch self-service tooling that engineers across CreativeX use to deploy, test or debug, so they wait less on the platform team

Requirements

• A background in platform, SRE, DevOps or infrastructure engineering, where you've owned and maintained production infrastructure rather than only building on top of it
• Typically 5–7 years of hands-on experience in those roles
• Strong experience running Linux in production
• Experience leading a database migration or significant architectural change on a live production system
• Deep, hands-on experience with cloud data platforms such as Postgres in production, including performance tuning and query optimisation
• A track record of scaling web applications and the infrastructure behind them, with a strong grounding in observability, monitoring and alerting
• Experience with a major cloud platform such as AWS or DigitalOcean, infrastructure as code (e.g. Ansible) and Datadog or similar monitoring
• Comfort reading and writing production code, ideally in Ruby on Rails
• Day-to-day use of AI tools such as Claude to build workflows and automation, not only as a search engine
• A drive to challenge the status quo and improve systems, and the confidence to lead changes other teams depend on
• Clear communication: you explain technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers, and write documentation others can follow
• Nice to have: running the infrastructure behind high-volume data or media pipelines; internal developer platforms or self-service tooling; working within a formal information security programme
• This role may not be the right fit if
• Your experience is mainly frontend or UI engineering
• Your backend work is mainly data engineering (building ingestion, ETL or analytics pipelines) rather than running and scaling the infrastructure underneath them
• You've mostly built product features on top of cloud infrastructure rather than owning its reliability, performance and migrations

Benefits

• Fully paid medical, dental, and vision (US) and Private Medical Insurance and Health Cash Plan (UK)
• Generous time off + bank holidays
• Education budget to be used for individual learning experiences or grouped with your team for joint learning
• Annual subscription to Calm and Headspace for your mental wellbeing
• Monthly coaching to talk to a trained professional about career goals, relationships, and personal development
• Competitive salary and commission plan including stock options, as we believe that everyone should have a stake in the business
• 4-month full pay parenting leave for all employees who have been with the company for one (1) year
• Employee contributions to a 401(k) once they have completed their eligibility period
• CreativeX provides equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees.
• As part of our commitment to maintaining a safe and secure workplace, CreativeX conducts standard right to work and background checks on all potential employees. This process is designed to verify the accuracy of information provided by candidates and to ensure a safe environment for all employees. Background checks are conducted via a secure third party application and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.