Vice President, Cloud - Remote at PayNearMe

Santa Clara, California, United States

PayNearMe Logo
Not SpecifiedCompensation
Expert & Leadership (9+ years)Experience Level
Full TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
FinTech, Payments, TechnologyIndustries

Requirements

  • 10-12+ years in engineering with 5+ leading Infra/Platform/DevOps/SRE teams
  • Deep AWS experience operating 24×7, high‑volume systems
  • Rails at scale: Operated a Ruby on Rails application in production on AWS (EC2/containers) and understand its deployment/runtime characteristics
  • Kubernetes expert: Designed/operated EKS (or equivalent) for mission‑critical services; multi‑AZ patterns, autoscaling, rollout strategies
  • Terraform author: Written and reviewed Terraform in anger; enforce code review, testing

Responsibilities

  • Reliability & SLOs: Define and enforce SLOs (target ≥99.95% for core services). Lead incident management and the shift from reactive to proactive reliability (redundancy, failure testing, chaos/DR exercises, error budgets)
  • AWS at Scale: Own our AWS environment (EC2/EKS, VPC, ALB/NLB, Route 53, S3, RDS/Aurora, IAM/KMS). Drive cost/performance tradeoffs and manage a seven‑figure AWS budget with clear FinOps guardrails
  • Two Stacks, One Standard: Operate and evolve the Rails monolith (EC2 today; containerized & Terraform‑managed going forward). Standardize the Go/Kubernetes services stack (EKS, Helm) with paved‑road templates, service bootstrapping, and zero‑toil deploys
  • Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD: Make infrastructure repeatable and reviewable using Terraform (authoring and review), Helm, and GitLab CI/CD. Reduce manual work to near zero
  • Networking & Service Mesh: Own ingress/egress (NGINX) and service mesh (Linkerd). Establish golden patterns for traffic management, authn/z, and resiliency
  • Observability: Ensure end‑to‑end visibility (DataDog, CloudWatch, logs/traces). Set high‑signal alerting and dashboards tied to user outcomes
  • Security & Compliance Partnering: Work hand‑in‑hand with Security to meet/beat PCI, SOC 2 and related audits; build controls into the platform by default
  • Data Layer Alignment: Partner with Data/DBA teams (Aurora MySQL & Postgres). Advise on reliability, strategies to support horizontal scaling of relational databases (examples under evaluation include TiDB and Vitess), backups/restore and multi‑AZ/region patterns. Scope may expand to include DB Engineering over time
  • People & Org: Lead ~10–12 engineers/contractors initially (growing to ~15). Uplevel talent, hire bar‑raisers, and coach legacy sysops profiles toward DevOps/SRE. Clarify roles, on‑call, and ownership to reduce bottlenecks

Skills

Key technologies and capabilities for this role

AWSEC2EKSKubernetesGoRailsSLOsInfrastructure as CodeIAMKMSRoute 53S3RDSAuroraVPCALBNLBChaos Engineering

Questions & Answers

Common questions about this position

Is this position remote?

Yes, this is a fully remote position with employees distributed across the U.S.

What salary or compensation is offered for this role?

This information is not specified in the job description.

What technical skills are required for the VP of Cloud role?

Key skills include expertise in AWS (EC2/EKS, VPC, ALB/NLB, Route 53, S3, RDS/Aurora, IAM/KMS), Terraform for infrastructure as code, Kubernetes (EKS, Helm), GitLab CI/CD, and observability tools like DataDog and CloudWatch.

What is the company culture like at PayNearMe?

PayNearMe is a high-growth, venture-backed company with over 240 employees distributed across the U.S., focused on modernizing payments technology and solving clients' biggest payment problems during its critical growth phase.

What makes a strong candidate for this VP of Cloud position?

A strong candidate is hands-on with cloud infrastructure, experienced in driving reliability through SLOs, transforming legacy systems to IaC, managing large AWS budgets, and leading standardization across Rails monolith and Go/Kubernetes stacks.

PayNearMe

Flexible payments platform for diverse transactions

About PayNearMe

PayNearMe provides a payments platform that allows customers to pay in various ways, including cards, ACH transactions, cash, and mobile payment methods like PayPal and Venmo. The platform is designed to enhance the payment experience for both customers and businesses, making it easy for clients such as consumer lenders and online gaming companies to collect payments. PayNearMe stands out by offering a secure cash payment service at over 60,000 retail locations, which simplifies the payment process for users who prefer cash. Additionally, the platform utilizes artificial intelligence to personalize customer experiences and improve bill pay. The company's goal is to create a seamless and user-friendly payment experience while generating revenue through fees charged to businesses for processing payments.

Santa Clara, CaliforniaHeadquarters
2009Year Founded
$156.1MTotal Funding
SERIES_DCompany Stage
Fintech, AI & Machine LearningIndustries
201-500Employees

Benefits

Professional Development Budget

Risks

Emerging fintech startups could erode PayNearMe's market share with similar solutions.
Regulatory scrutiny may increase compliance costs for PayNearMe.
Partnership with Trustly exposes PayNearMe to open banking data privacy risks.

Differentiation

PayNearMe offers a wide range of payment options, including cash and digital wallets.
The platform integrates AI to enhance personalized customer experiences and improve payment solutions.
Partnerships with companies like Trustly and PayPal expand PayNearMe's payment capabilities.

Upsides

The rise of BNPL services presents an opportunity to expand PayNearMe's payment options.
Increasing mobile wallet usage allows PayNearMe to enhance its mobile-first payment methods.
Open banking regulations in the US offer new integration opportunities for PayNearMe.

Land your dream remote job 3x faster with AI