Platform Engineer

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to help us build and maintain our infrastructure, ensure system reliability, and optimize application performance at scale.

Full-time · West Michigan

Ludus is a SaaS company that builds digital tools trusted by thousands of organizations of all sizes to power their event ticketing, marketing, fundraising, retail and registration needs.

Role Description:

The Site Reliability Engineer at Ludus is responsible for expanding and managing the web services that power the company’s ecosystem. This role involves designing and implementing scalable, high-performing solutions for servers, databases, and deployment strategies. The position plays a key part in building a sustainable and reliable future for Ludus’ growing platform and user base. With a strong understanding of business goals, the Site Reliability Engineer helps shape architecture and development operations across the suite of applications. Beyond modernizing core systems and optimizing performance, this role plays a strategic part in scaling reliability through improved redundancy and better distribution of infrastructure expertise across the team.

Responsibilities include:

• hands-on work with database backups, server deployments, monitoring, and other key infrastructure tasks that help maintain system stability and reliability.
• The Site Reliability Engineer will be an important part of a collaborative engineering team and have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to a fast-growing product while shaping the future of infrastructure at Ludus.

Where We Are Today

Application Stack:

PHP and Laravel (TALL Stack) with a MySQL database. We are migrating to Laravel while maintaining our legacy system. The SRE will help stabilize and optimize both.

Infrastructure:

Linux, Nginx, Docker, Ansible, Cloudflare, Terraform

Cloud Provider:

We use Digital Ocean as our cloud provider, but we are in the process of moving to AWS and would be looking for this SRE to be heavily involved in that migration.

Things you should know before applying

At Ludus, our mission is to bring people together through shared experiences. It’s a big goal that allows for limitless expansion to make a difference in the world. We move fast and are constantly learning and adapting. We embrace low process and high trust to navigate change and figure out what works. We believe success is never final and when you think it is, that is when you fail. For us, success is a sum of small efforts, including trial and error, so we move at an unrelenting weekly pace. In order to grow as a company and individually, discomfort is necessary so we can continue exploring new ideas and push ourselves to build quality tools to offer the best solutions for our customers. If you prefer a hand-holding environment where everything is black and white, that’s not us. If you’re a self-starter and can thrive in controlled chaos, Ludus is the place for you — it’s time to find your role ⬇️

What you'll be doing

• Help migrate our infrastructure from Digital Ocean to AWS
• Infrastructure automation and configuration management
• Helping to manage our database integrity and reliability through backups, read replicas, setting up monitoring tools, and other necessary database operations
• Create, architect, monitor, and troubleshoot our system infrastructure
• Develop and provide operational support for full-stack software applications
• Capacity planning, testing, and performance optimization
• Fault tolerance, disaster recovery, incident response and analysis
• Release management and deployment automation
• Help ensure network and server security across our various communicating servers
• Increase system resilience and serve larger customer volumes through code, server configuration, and other system scaling methodologies
• Optimizing and managing our CI/CD pipelines for improved release confidence and reduced regression
• Research, development, and leadership in regards to ways we can improve our overall systems at Ludus
• Increase our valuable observability, implementing alerting with Cloudwatch and other tools to identify system performance issues before our customers do
• Assist in MySQL performance tuning and optimizations when needed.
• Help triage and handle infra-related incidents and participating in our rotating on-call schedule

Traits we're looking for (In no certain order)

• 5+ years of experience with cloud and server technologies
• 2+ years experience with AWS for infrastructure management
• Strong understanding of Continuous Integration and deployment strategies with common DevOps tools, Linux servers, and the web application deployment
• Strong understanding of MySQL relational databases, the ability to configure read replicas and backups, archiving/partitioning and troubleshooting performance issues
• Experience with Docker or similar containerization tools
• Familiarity with Nginx & PHP environments (php-fpm, swoole, frankenphp, etc)
• Understanding of fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Comfortable working in Linux environments and optimizing Nginx, MySQL, and caching strategies.
• Experience with developer-focused cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (AWS preferred)
• Some hands-on experience or familiarity with Docker, Ansible, Cloudflare (Workers, Firewall, Load Balancing), and MySQL replication
• Experience writing secure, well-tested code and identifying vulnerabilities.
• Strong debugging skills, including profiling, query optimization, and performance tuning.

BONUS Qualifications:

• Familiarity with common web technologies and frameworks like PHP/Laravel
• Experience with edge technologies like Cloudflare
• Experience with observability and logging technologies
• Familiarity with WebSockets or event-driven architectures
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, etc
• Background in load testing and high-concurrency optimization
• Past experience as a Software Engineer
• Experience working through compliance audits and approvals (PCI, SOC-2, etc)

PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:

• Autonomous in their ability to develop software and ask questions
• Ability to collaborate with humility and curiosity in a team environment
• Ability to provide thoughtful technical solutions to code and architecture without over-engineering solutions
• Ability to communicate technical concepts and trade offs to non technical stakeholders
• A strong capability to work with engineers to solve local dev environment and production issues that arise

Perks

• 💪 Health Insurance (Medical, Vision, Dental) — Provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield and Guardian. Ludus covers 90% of the premium of our employees and 50% of all dependents.
• 💵 401(k) matching — Full match on the first 5% contribution and 50% match on the next 5% of contribution (7.5% contribution match by Ludus if you contribute 10%).
• 📈 Profit Sharing and Stock Options — We believe in sharing our success and offer annual profit-sharing bonuses during profitable years, along with stock options that give employees a stake in our long-term growth and success.
• 👓 Personal Wellness — $50 monthly reimbursement that can be used on anything personal wellness related.
• 🎫 Experience Credit — $100 yearly reimbursement toward concert tickets, theatre tickets, etc. to encourage shared experiences.
• ⛱ Flexible PTO — Take the time you need for vacation or personal days - simply work with your team to ensure everything runs smooth while you are away.
• 😷 Sick Days — If you're under the weather, we expect you to take the time needed to recover within reason.

Role Details

Salary Range: 115k-140k DOE

Location: /Hybrid - Mon & Weds in our Ada office

Hours: Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM EST, with occasional after-hours availability required as part of an on-call rotation for emergencies.

This position reports to: Engineering Manager

Apply for the job

Interested in joining our growing team? Then we'd love to hear from you!