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Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019)

Shield AI· Hivemind Enterprise Division – Engineering
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San Diego, CA, San Mateo, CA$160k - $240kFull Time EmployeePosted 4w ago

About the role

Staff Platform Engineer responsible for designing and implementing Kubernetes-native platform capabilities and distributed infrastructure to power Forge, Shield AI’s AI Factory, across cloud, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments.

Responsibilities

  • Build Kubernetes-native platform services: Develop and operate Kubernetes-based services, controllers, operators, deployment patterns, and runtime integrations that support distributed workloads across multiple environments.
  • Develop distributed orchestration capabilities: Design and build reusable primitives for authoring, scheduling, and scaling pipeline work.
  • Build reliable data-processing infrastructure: Develop platform capabilities for data storage, ingestion, validation, transformation, and governance.
  • Develop highly extensible platform components: Provide standardized tooling around authentication, authorization, observation, networking, routing, secret management, and more to the services integrated on top of the ecosystem.
  • Create reference architectures: Establish recommended deployment patterns, operating profiles, capacity guidance, benchmarks, reliability practices, and distribution approaches across cloud, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments.
  • Advance observability and operability: Establish end-to-end metrics, logs, traces, structured events, dashboards, alerting, SLOs, operational diagnostics, and runbooks for workflows, pipelines, event streams, and platform services.
  • Partner with downstream teams: Work with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, test, infrastructure, product, and customer-facing teams to turn recurring distributed-systems problems into reusable platform capabilities.

Qualifications

  • Significant experience designing and operating production distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, backend infrastructure, or data-intensive services.
  • Strong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in Go and Python.
  • Deep understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals including failure handling, idempotency, consistency tradeoffs, retries, ordering, delivery semantics, backpressure, partitioning, state management, and fault tolerance.
  • Experience designing or operating workflow orchestration, distributed job execution, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, or long-running service workflows.
  • Ability to define architecture and technical standards while remaining hands-on in implementation, production troubleshooting, performance analysis, and reliability improvement.
  • Experience working across multiple teams to turn recurring infrastructure needs into reusable, well-documented platform capabilities.
  • Clear technical communication and the ability to make complex distributed-systems architecture understandable to both specialists and downstream users.

Skills

Required:GoPython

Benefits

  • Bonus
  • Benefits
  • Equity
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Shield AI

Autonomy for the world.

Our mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems.

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