Infrastructure Engineer (Platform / Reliability)

About Wander

Wander is revolutionizing the $100 B+ short‑term rental industry. We curate every aspect of the guest experience—from our smart homes to our intuitive booking platform. Our mission is to help people find their happy place, and our vision is to create the infrastructure for people to experience the world.

Backed by top‑tier investors and led by experienced startup veterans, we're a tight‑knit, remote‑first team united by our passion for travel, technology, and creating unforgettable experiences.

About the Role

We’re hiring an Infrastructure Engineer to build and operate the platform that lets Wander’s product and application engineers move fast without breaking things. Your job is to make the right thing the easy thing: reliable environments, predictable deployments, strong observability, and resilient systems by default.

This role is hands-on and ownership-driven. You’ll work closely with application engineers as we break apart a monolith, move toward event-driven systems, and scale to 100× throughput and operational load.

We’re remote-first, async by default, with minimal meetings and a strong culture of trust and accountability.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate GKE-based infrastructure for production and non-production environments.
• Own availability, resilience, and uptime for core platform services.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that are fast, reliable, and boring.
• Enable safe, repeatable deployments (progressive delivery, rollbacks, environment parity).
• Support and evolve event-driven architectures (queues, streams, async workflows).
• Implement strong monitoring, alerting, and observability so issues are found before customers do.
• Create one-click or near-zero-friction developer environments.
• Partner with application engineers to remove friction and improve developer velocity.
• Automate aggressively — manual steps are bugs.
• Document systems and decisions so the platform scales with the team.

What We’re Looking For

• Solid experience running production workloads on GKE (or equivalent Kubernetes environments).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals:
• • Failure modes, backpressure, retries, idempotency
  • Event delivery semantics and ordering
• Experience building event-driven systems (pub/sub, queues, streams).
• Proven track record improving:
• • Uptime and reliability
  • Deployment safety
  • Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
• Experience with:
• • CI/CD and delivery pipelines
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Monitoring, logging, and alerting systems
• A strong bias toward developer experience.
  If developers are slowed down, that’s a platform bug.
• Comfort working asynchronously with minimal process overhead.
• Willingness to learn — we don’t expect perfection, we expect progress.

How We Work

• Remote-first, async-first. Meetings are rare and purposeful.
• Tickets exist to create alignment, not drag.
• Infrastructure is a product — with users (developers) and measurable outcomes.
• Engineers own what they run.
• We value clarity, reliability, and follow-through over cleverness.
• Fast-moving, but flexible. We optimize for real impact.

How We Evaluate

• Reliability and stability of the systems you own
• Quality of developer experience you enable
• Thoughtfulness around failure and recovery
• Ability to simplify complex systems
• Ownership, communication, and collaboration

Why This Role Matters

As Wander scales, infrastructure is leverage. The difference between a fragile system and a resilient one shows up in customer trust, developer velocity, and on-call load.

This role is about building the platform that makes growth sustainable — and doing it in a way that respects the people using it.