About Basis

Basis equips accountants with a team of AI agents to take on real workflows.

We have hit product-market fit, have more demand than we can meet, and just raised $34m to scale at a speed that meets this moment.

Built in New York City. Read more about Basis here.

About the Team

The Platform Engineering team at Basis designs, builds, and operates the infrastructure that powers our AI research and products. We’re a lean team that loves architecting large-scale distributed systems from first principles.

We obsess over clarity: clean abstractions, simple mental models, and crisp interfaces that let our AI and product teams move fast without breaking things.

We’re not building features—we’re building foundations for an AI accountant. That means modeling the world the agent lives in (accounting concepts, workflows, and constraints) and providing scalable, observable, and reliable systems that everything else depends on.

About the Role

As a Tech Lead on the Platform team, you’ll hold the technical vision for a core slice of Basis’s infrastructure—how we deploy, model, and serve the data and systems our AI depends on.

You’ll design elegant architectures, make trade-offs explicit, and teach others how to reason about distributed systems with clarity and rigor. You’ll drive coherence across runtime, data, and schema layers—so our systems scale predictably and remain legible as we grow.

You’ll lead by example through code, design reviews, and decision records—ensuring the platform is not just powerful, but beautiful in its simplicity.

What you’ll be doing:

1. Architect and evolve our infrastructure foundations

   • Design scalable, cost-efficient services across compute, storage, and networking.

   • Define deployment and runtime patterns (containers, orchestration, IaC, secrets, CI/CD).

   • Build systems for observability and reliability—metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, and recovery patterns.

   • Lead postmortems, define error budgets, and ensure operational excellence becomes a habit.

   2. Build and standardize our data platform

   • Architect data pipelines that ingest, validate, and transform accounting data into clean, reliable datasets.

   • Define schemas and data contracts that balance flexibility with correctness.

   • Encode validation, lineage, and drift detection as first-class citizens in every pipeline.

   • Build interfaces that make data discoverable, computable, and observable end-to-end.

   3. Model the domain as a system

   • Translate accounting concepts into well-structured ontologies—entities, relationships, and invariants.

   • Create abstractions that allow AI systems to reason safely about real-world constraints.

   • Design for legibility: make complex workflows understandable through schema, code, and documentation.

   4. Lead through clarity and technical excellence

   • Hold the architectural vision for your area and ensure it stays coherent over time.

   • Run crisp design reviews that challenge assumptions and drive alignment.

   • Mentor engineers on reasoning about systems: from load testing to schema design to observability patterns.

   • Simplify aggressively—removing accidental complexity and enforcing clean, stable
     

📍 Location: NYC, Flatiron office. In-person team.

What Success looks like in this role

• Architect: The systems you design scale cleanly and are easy for others to reason about.

• Integrator: Platform, ML, and product systems fit together through clear contracts and conventions.

• Teacher: Your design reviews, docs, and code elevate how others think about architecture.

• Operator: You make reliability measurable and downtime boring.

• Builder: You approach every decision with clarity, conviction, and calm.

In accordance with New York State regulations, the salary range for this position is $100,000 –$300,000. This range represents our broad compensation philosophy and covers various responsibility and experience levels. Additionally, all employees are eligible to participate in our equity plan and benefits program. We are committed to meritocratic and competitive compensation.