Member of Technical Staff (Infrastructure)
Footprint·Mid-level·On-site · New York·$180k–$260k USD
Posted Oct 18, 2026·jobs.ashbyhq.com
Footprint is the agentic platform that learns your compliance program and runs it end to end.
Compliance teams at banks and fintechs are drowning in financial crimes investigations. Transaction volumes are surging, regulators keep raising the bar, and the work still runs on manual review queues stitched together from legacy vendors. Percy, our agentic system, learns each team's procedures and makes the same calls their analysts would: clearing false positives, escalating real risk, writing the case narrative, and documenting every decision for audit. It cuts review workloads by 70%+.
The harder problem is underneath. Every investigation is grounded in the data sources compliance teams already trust, and every case commits to an organizational memory that compounds — so a pattern one analyst caught in March surfaces automatically in October, across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. Whether the team is five analysts or 500, they share one brain. Every memory carries provenance. Agents propose; humans approve. That's four years of identity infrastructure sitting under the agent, and it's the part nobody can bolt on later.
We're backed by QED, Index, and Box Group, and trusted by FDIC- and OCC-regulated banks plus fintechs like Bilt, Nuvei, and MoonPay. We 5x'd revenue last year. The team is small, senior, and ships fast.
The Role
For four years, Footprint's infrastructure had one job: run identity verifications fast, correctly, and always. A verification is a bounded request. It arrives, it resolves, it returns.
Percy changed the shape of the problem. An investigation is a long-running agent that reasons across dozens of data sources, spawns sub-agents, executes code in an isolated sandbox, and writes an audit record a regulator will eventually read. It takes minutes. It costs real money every time it runs. It fails in ways a request/response API never does. And it now sits on the critical path of our customers' financial-crime operations, on some of the most sensitive data on the internet.
Our backend engineers built all of it while also shipping product, and they've kept it up. Agent infrastructure has become a full-time problem, and nobody here has it as a full-time job. That's this role.
You're inheriting a real system that works, built by people who had other jobs at the time. Your job is to own it deliberately. Agent compute, observability, CI/CD, and task scheduling become yours to shape. You'll make the build-versus-buy calls, set the standards the rest of engineering works to, and take infrastructure off the backend team's plate so they can focus on product.
You'll report directly to Head of Engineering - Elliott Forde.
What You'll Own
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Agent compute. Percy's agents run in sandboxed, isolated environments, spawning sub-agents and executing code against regulated customer data. You own how that compute gets provisioned, deployed, isolated, and scaled, and how quickly an engineer can safely ship a change to it
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Observability across Rust services and AI agents. Define how we measure reliability, latency, and cost, including what a single agent run costs us to complete. Today, tracing a slow investigation end to end is harder than it should be. Make production legible enough that any engineer can debug it
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CI/CD and per-PR ephemeral environments. Every engineer here depends on the path from commit to production and on getting a real environment for every pull request. You own both, along with the merge queue, code review tooling, and a testing strategy the team can rely on
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Build versus buy. Task scheduling is the live one and it's your call. That question arrives again every time we scale, and you're the person with the context to answer it well
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Developer experience as a product. Your users are Footprint engineers. Invest in the tooling, feedback loops, and paved paths that make them faster
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Product work, when that's the fastest path. A good share of this role is infrastructure in service of a specific product problem. You'll write product code directly when the team needs it
Stack
Rust · Postgres and Aurora · AWS (ECS/Fargate, CloudFront) · Pulumi and Terraform · Datadog and OpenTelemetry · GitHub Actions
Deep experience with most of this, and the judgment to pick up the rest, is what matters.
Must-Have
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4+ years operating production infrastructure on a major cloud - provisioning, deploying, and debugging real systems under load
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Fluency with infrastructure-as-code and a track record of managing infrastructure declaratively
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Strong observability instincts: you've built the metrics, traces, logs, and alerting that let a team catch and resolve incidents quickly
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Experience owning CI/CD pipelines and the build and deploy systems a whole engineering org depends on
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Depth on relational databases, especially Postgres: performance, scaling, and safe schema and operational changes
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A bias toward leverage: the tooling you build makes the whole team faster
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Comfort holding several competing priorities at once
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Comfort at an early-stage company, taking a function nobody has owned yet and making it your own
Nice-to-Have
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Experience deploying or sandboxing AI-agent and LLM workloads (Modal or similar serverless compute)
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Security-minded infrastructure experience: secrets management, network isolation, least-privilege IAM. We're a company built on detecting and stopping financial crime, so this counts for a lot here
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Experience with multi-tenant systems handling regulated data, where tenant isolation had to hold up to a customer security review or a compliance audit
Success Looks Like
90 Days: You own a slice of our infrastructure and you've fixed a bottleneck the team actually feels - faster agent deploys, ephemeral environments people trust, or an observability gap that now lets on-call trace a slow agent run end to end. Infrastructure decisions get routed to you.
1 Year: You lead infrastructure at Footprint. Agent compute is fast, isolated, and observable. We have real reliability, latency, and cost-per-run numbers. Engineers trust CI/CD. You've made a defensible build-versus-buy call on task scheduling, and the backend team ships faster because infrastructure is off their plate.
Why Join Footprint
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Massive impact, fast: You'll work on projects that shape company direction, not analysis that gets shelved.
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Own meaningful work: From day one, you'll have direct ownership over strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.
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Real growth opportunity: Promotion timelines depend on performance: the harder you work, the quicker you'll get promoted.
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Winning team and culture: We're a fast-moving, no-BS team that likes to win (and have fun doing it).
Benefits
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💰 Generous compensation and equity packages
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🍽 Free lunch and dinner (after 7pm)
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💪 Monthly wellness stipend
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🏖 Unlimited PTO
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🏥 Fully covered health, dental, and vision insurance
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🚀 The chance to help shape the future of internet identity and financial crime prevention
