Staff/Principal Platform Engineer

Staff/Platform Principal Engineer

About the Company

Our client is building the infrastructure powering some of the world's most advanced real-time AI applications. Their voice and language models are used across gaming, education, healthcare, digital companions, and consumer AI products serving hundreds of millions of users.

Backed by more than $125M from leading investors, the company combines the technical ambition of an elite AI startup with the resources to build at global scale.

The company is looking for a Staff or Principal Platform Engineer to help build the cloud infrastructure behind these products and shape how engineering teams deploy, scale, and operate AI systems.

Why this job?

This isn't a traditional infrastructure role. You'll own the platform that powers production AI workloads, helping engineers ship faster while improving reliability, scalability, and developer experience across the company. You'll work on problems involving Kubernetes at scale, infrastructure as code, GitOps, AI-powered developer tooling, and cloud platforms supporting real-time inference. The platform team is intentionally small, giving you significant ownership over architecture, tooling, and engineering practices. As the team grows, there is also a clear opportunity to take on technical leadership.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate highly available cloud infrastructure supporting real-time AI products.
• Own Kubernetes clusters, Helm charts, and Kustomize deployments.
• Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform and Terragrunt.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines using ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, and modern GitOps practices.
• Develop internal tooling that increases engineering productivity through automation and AI.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve deployment velocity, observability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Investigate production issues and implement long-term reliability improvements.
• Help drive a culture of ownership where teams build, deploy, and operate the services they create.

Who does well here

Engineers who enjoy solving infrastructure problems at scale and prefer building systems over maintaining legacy environments.

Strong candidates typically have:

• 8 years of software or platform engineering experience.
• Deep Kubernetes expertise, including production cluster management.
• Experience with Terraform or Terragrunt.
• Strong knowledge of at least one major cloud platform such as GCP, AWS, Azure, or Oracle Cloud.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines with tools like ArgoCD and GitHub Actions.
• Experience supporting large-scale distributed systems.

You'll be especially competitive if you also have experience with:

• AI or machine learning infrastructure
• Real-time or low-latency systems
• High-growth startups
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Internal developer platforms and tooling

What you'll get

• End-to-end ownership over infrastructure powering real-time AI products used at massive scale.
• The opportunity to shape engineering practices and platform architecture across the organization.
• A collaborative team of exceptional infrastructure and AI engineers.
• A clear path toward technical leadership as the platform team grows.
• Competitive equity and a compensation package designed for Staff and Principal-level engineers.

Terms

• Hybrid role based in Mountain View, CA, with 3 days per week onsite.
• $280,000-$350,000 base salary, plus competitive equity and comprehensive benefits.
• Open to eligible U.S. visa transfers.
• Full-time position.
• If you're passionate about Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and building the foundation that enables world-class AI products to scale, we'd love to hear from you.