Staff Infrastructure Engineer

About Us:

Forage is building the modern payments stack that powers inclusive commerce. Our technology enables grocers, delivery platforms, and point-of-sale systems to seamlessly accept EBT payments both online and in-store. Beyond infrastructure, we’re helping SNAP EBT shoppers stretch their grocery budgets every week, making healthy food more affordable and accessible to the 42 million Americans on food assistance.​

Backed by leading fintech investors, Forage is a fast-growing startup with a clear vision and real-world impact, feeding tens of thousands of families daily. Our team is made up of kind, driven individuals who take ownership, move quickly, and collaborate closely. We value humility, curiosity, and a shared commitment to making a difference.​

We’re not just building payments infrastructure — we’re helping feed tens of thousands of families each day, and transforming grocery access for millions more. Watch our story and see why we do what we do .

What we are looking for:

As our Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll own the foundation everything else is built on. You’ll be trusted with wide autonomy: setting the roadmap for infrastructure, deciding which systems need tightening up, and knowing when it’s time to re-architect versus leave something steady. Day to day, you’ll spot weak points before they turn into outages, fine-tune databases to keep them fast under load, and put guardrails in place so product engineers can ship quickly. At the staff level, you’ll act as both builder and steward — evolving what’s working, replacing what isn’t, and defining what “great infrastructure” looks like for the company.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.


• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years focused on infrastructure/DevOps/SRE.


• Deep experience with AWS (or another major cloud provider) and infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, CDK, Pulumi, CloudFormation).


• Ability to “productionize” systems — monitoring, hardening, scaling, security.


• Proven track record of owning complex systems in production — especially cloud infra and databases.


• Experience designing systems and influencing product engineers to think scalable in a fast paced environment


• Strong communication skills; able to collaborate across engineering and with stakeholders.


• Nice to have: prior experience in fintech, payments, or other highly regulated environments.


• Nice to have: prior experience as first infrastructure engineer/SRE at a start-up.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own our Cloud footprint : Manage and evolve our AWS environment (networks, IAM, monitoring, CloudTrail, Terraform) to ensure security, scalability, and reliability.


• Productionize at scale : Improve our systems’ hardening, observability, and resiliency. Build automation and guardrails so the rest of engineering can move fast without breaking things.


• Be our database expert : Lead the operational excellence of our Postgres deployments (performance, monitoring, tuning, HA/disaster recovery).


• Mentor and unblock product engineers: Partner with engineering teams to deliver infra that accelerates product development. Mentor engineers on infra-related topics and help raise the team’s overall bar.


• Establish best practices: Drive high engineering standards across surfaces such as infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and incident response.

Our Offer:

Your base salary would fall within the bands below. Please keep in mind that the equity portion of your offer is not included in these numbers and represents a significant part of your total compensation.

• Compensation: $215-235k USD base + equity + benefits


• Meaningful work that makes a positive impact on our society.


• 100% of Medical, Dental and Vision premium coverage for yourself and dependents.


• Enjoy regular team lunches at our San Francisco and New York offices , fostering collaboration and connection over great food.


• A fun and caring environment that prioritizes transparency, growth, and ownership.


• A talented, diverse, high-achieving, and humble team with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries at our headquarters in San Francisco, California. Individual pay is determined by work location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

We aim to review every application within 3 business days of submission and provide feedback on each of your interviews within 2 business days of completion. If you don't hear from us, please reach out to your recruiter or [email protected] directly to get an update on your candidacy. Max, our AI recruiter, may reach out with follow-up questions.

Please note: We are not engaging with third-party recruiters or agencies for this role. We kindly ask that you refrain from contacting us regarding recruitment services.