Cloud Engineer at Branch FinTech - $135-150k GCP Role in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Solid Mid-Level Cloud Engineering Role at a Growth-Stage FinTech
Branch operates in the earned wage access and financial inclusion space — a growing niche within FinTech. This Cloud Operations Engineer role is positioned at the mid-level (3+ years experience), offering mentorship from senior engineers while giving you meaningful ownership over GCP infrastructure, security compliance, and automation.
Compensation vs. Market: The $135–150k base is competitive for a mid-level Cloud/Infrastructure engineer in the U.S., aligning with the 60th–75th percentile for this experience band nationally. It's below top-of-market for senior engineers in high-cost markets (SF, NYC) but strong for remote-first roles with flexible PTO.
Skills You'll Build:
- GCP infrastructure management — high demand across enterprise and startup markets
- Kubernetes and containerization — foundational for modern DevOps careers
- Observability tooling (monitoring, logging, tracing) — increasingly critical for SRE paths
- AI-augmented workflows (Claude, Copilot, Gemini) — forward-looking skill as AI tooling becomes standard
- Compliance and regulatory infrastructure — valuable in FinTech and healthcare verticals
Culture Signals: Branch is remote-first, award-winning for workplace culture, and emphasizes employee voice. The mention of cross-departmental automation projects suggests engineers get broad exposure beyond pure infrastructure work — a green flag for career breadth.
Watch Out For: The 24/7 on-call rotation is a real work-life balance consideration. Ensure on-call compensation or comp time is part of the total package conversation during negotiation.
About Us:
Branch is on a mission to empower workers with financial freedom. We do this by helping companies accelerate payments and providing working Americans with accessible, free financial services. We're committed to building and delivering more inclusive, transparent, and frictionless financial products.
Our goal of empowerment extends to our own employees, too. Have a great idea? Share it today and it might just get implemented tomorrow. As a member of our team, your voice and creativity matter—and they can directly impact our products, company, and culture.
We not only focus on attracting great talent from across the country, but also on building teams that help that talent thrive. That means valuing a diversity of opinions and working styles, while creating a shared belief in innovation, initiative, and winning together.
Come join our team as we develop new ways to improve the lives of working Americans.
About the Role:
We're looking for a Cloud Operations Engineer to join our Cloud Ops team.
Key Responsibilities:
- Implement and maintain cloud infrastructure in GCP under the direction of senior engineers.
- Contribute to keeping our cloud infrastructure scalable, secure, and highly available.
- Build automation that reduces toil and helps infrastructure recover from production incidents.
- Troubleshoot issues and provide support for our cloud infrastructure and observability tools.
- Help ensure our cloud infrastructure is compliant with relevant security and regulatory standards.
- Follow and contribute to incident response process and tooling; participate in monitoring and alerting work across the application stack.
- Collaborate within the tech org on infrastructure work, with some exposure to cross-departmental projects, including workflow automation (crons, n8n, Airflow) that bridges infrastructure and business processes.
- Participate in Ops team processes: outage incidents, compliance requirements, sprint work, metrics collection, and documentation.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 3+ years of professional experience in cloud infrastructure engineering (preferably GCP).
- Familiarity with observability tools and processes, such as monitoring, logging, and tracing.
- Working experience in at least one programming/scripting language such as Python, Bash, Java, or Go.
- Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
- Some exposure to network and application security practices or teams.
- Comfortable leveraging AI tools to accelerate work. The company provides access to Claude, and integrates Copilot and Gemini into automation workflows.
- Ability to work in a 24/7 on-call rotation.
Nice to Haves:
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and Git.
- Collaboration experience with Data Engineering teams.
- Exposure to automation and configuration management tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Chef.
- Previous experience in a 24/7 on-call environment.
Compensation:
The base salary range for this role is $135,000–$150,000. The salary range displayed reflects an average base salary range for the position across all the U.S. The base salary offered to an applicant could be higher or lower based on each applicant's specific skill set, depth of experience, relevant education or training, etc.
Location:
This position is classified as REMOTE within the United States of America.
We are unable to hire candidates located outside of the domestic U.S.
Benefits:
- Market-leading medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Stock options
- Free Premium-Tier Origin Financial Wellness subscription
- Monthly home-office stipend
- 401k (TransAmerica)
- 12-weeks paid parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents
- Flexible time off + sick and safe time
- 11 paid company holidays
- Branch@Branch Same Day Pay Option
Working at Branch:
A remote-first company with employees located throughout the U.S., Branch emphasizes transparency, accountability, and trust to create a collaborative environment where our product, engineering, marketing, customer support, customer success, and sales teams can all thrive together. Learn more about what we do in this video!
Our collaborative spirit has helped us become an award-winning FinTech company, with Branch's innovation and workplace recognized across industries. Branch has been honored by Inc., the Webby Awards, Benzinga FinTech Awards, FinTech Breakthrough Awards, Top Workplaces USA, Great Places to Work, and EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Heartland, among others.
Learn more about our culture, approach, technology, and people here: https://www.branchapp.com/about
Branch is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
Must be currently authorized to work in the USA without sponsorship or transfer.
No third-parties, please.
View how Branch collects your personal data here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Cloud Operations Engineer role fully remote?
What is the salary for this Cloud Ops Engineer role at Branch?
Does this role require being on call?
What cloud platform does Branch primarily use?
What benefits does Branch offer for this role?
