Porter, a Series A platform-as-a-service provider that automates cloud infrastructure management inside a user's own cloud accounts, is expanding its engineering team in New York City. Founded out of Y Combinator's S20 batch, the 18-person company has raised $26.6 million in total funding from investors including Sequoia Capital India, Lightbank, Soma Capital, Venrock, and FirstMark Capital.
Automated Infrastructure in Customer Cloud Accounts
Porter operates as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that runs directly within a customer's AWS, GCP, or Azure accounts. Rather than hosting applications on a proprietary third-party platform, Porter provisions underlying cloud resources—including Kubernetes clusters—while abstracting away operational complexity. Developers point the platform at their code repository, and Porter handles application deployment, CI/CD automation, and autoscaling.
Under the hood, the platform relies on a frontend stack of React and TypeScript, paired with Go, Postgres, Redis, and Kubernetes and Helm APIs on the backend. The platform is designed for growth-stage companies seeking PaaS-level developer experience without taking on dedicated DevOps overhead or sacrificing control over their cloud environments.
Team Background and Leadership
Porter was founded in 2020 by Justin Rhee, who attended the University of Pennsylvania, and Trevor Shim, who attended Yale University. Co-founder Alexander Belanger served as CTO from 2020 to 2023 before stepping down to launch Hatchet.
Rhee and Shim built Porter after navigating infrastructure challenges during their initial Y Combinator batch. As Justin Rhee stated in a feature by Amazon Web Services (AWS), "During that time, we were spending a lot of time managing our own infrastructure and asking ourselves if we needed to hire engineers to do this for us." That experience led the team to focus on eliminating infrastructure overhead for early-stage and scaling startups.
According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Porter integrates directly with cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Because infrastructure runs inside customer cloud tenancies, startups can use program credits from cloud providers to cover compute costs. Porter achieved profitability in Q3 2022 after growing its annual recurring revenue 8x from the start of that year.
Rhee noted that adoption often comes from experienced operators: "There’s actually an inverse correlation where our users with the most DevOps experience, who have set up and managed infrastructure at very large companies, are the ones most likely to recognize the benefits of using a service like ours."
Hiring Focus and Open Roles
To support platform growth, Porter is recruiting across core engineering disciplines, primarily based onsite at its New York headquarters with select remote positions.
On the platform side, the company is recruiting a Founding Security Engineer ($200,000–$300,000) to lead security architecture, alongside a Staff Infrastructure Engineer ($200,000–$280,000) focused on cloud systems and Kubernetes orchestration. Mid-level and entry-level backend work includes a Backend Engineer (Go) ($100,000–$200,000).
For web interfaces and developer experience, Porter is hiring a Staff Frontend Engineer ($200,000–$280,000) and a mid-level Frontend Engineer ($150,000–$200,000). Product engineering hires include a Growth/Product Engineer ($100,000–$200,000) and a Full Stack Engineer ($100,000–$200,000) in New York City. Candidates seeking remote flexibility can apply for a DevOps Support Engineer ($120,000–$180,000) position.
| Role | Location | Work Mode | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founding Security Engineer | New York, NY, US | Onsite | $200,000 – $300,000 |
| Growth/Product Engineer | New York City | Onsite | $100,000 – $200,000 |
| Frontend Engineer | New York, NY, US | Onsite | $150,000 – $200,000 |
| Backend Engineer (Go) | New York City | Onsite | $100,000 – $200,000 |
| Staff Frontend Engineer | New York, NY, US | Onsite | $200,000 – $280,000 |
| Staff Infrastructure Engineer | New York, NY, US | Onsite | $200,000 – $280,000 |
| Full Stack Engineer | New York City | Onsite | $100,000 – $200,000 |
| DevOps Support Engineer | Remote | Remote | $120,000 – $180,000 |
