{"id":1123589,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019","title":"Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019)","company":{"id":50,"name":"Shield AI","domain":"shield.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/shield-ai","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":74,"open_postings":97,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.856,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":62,"computed_at":"2026-11-14T05:58:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Diego, United States","San Mateo, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":290000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":290000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"Argo Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"ArgoCD","optional":true},{"name":"Dagster","optional":true},{"name":"Envoy","optional":true},{"name":"ETL/ELT","optional":true},{"name":"Flyte","optional":true},{"name":"GitOps","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"Helm","optional":true},{"name":"Jaeger","optional":true},{"name":"Loki","optional":true},{"name":"NATS","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":true},{"name":"Prefect","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":true},{"name":"Ray","optional":true},{"name":"Redpanda","optional":true},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-22T18:31:02Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-22","last_verified_at":"2026-11-14T14:32:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":52,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":52},"description":"Job Description:\nWe are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to contribute to the Platform solutions and infrastructure that power Forge, the AI Factory. These components provide distributed runtime capabilities that enable teams to reliably orchestrate workloads, process data, and underpin the workflows of building an AI Pilot.\nThe Forge Platform Engineering team provides Kubernetes-native capabilities that support autonomy development, simulation, testing, training, evaluation, deployment, and operational workflows across commercial cloud, on-premises infrastructure, sovereign deployments, edge environments, and fully air-gapped systems.\nThis is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will define platform architecture, implement production software, establish reusable operational patterns, and partner with teams across autonomy, ML, simulation, test, infrastructure, and product engineering. Success requires balancing developer productivity, reliability, extensibility, performance, portability, and long-term operational maintainability.\nWhat you'll do:\nBuild Kubernetes-native platform services: Develop and operate Kubernetes-based services, controllers, operators, deployment patterns, and runtime integrations that support distributed workloads across multiple environments. \nDevelop distributed orchestration capabilities: Design and build reusable primitives for authoring, scheduling, and scaling pipeline work. \nBuild reliable data-processing infrastructure: Develop platform capabilities for data storage, ingestion, validation, transformation, and governance. \nDevelop highly extensible platform components: The Forge Platform base provides standardized tooling around authentication, authorization, observation, networking, routing, secret management, and more to the services that are integrated on top of the ecosystem. \nCreate reference architectures: Establish recommended deployment patterns, operating profiles, capacity guidance, benchmarks, reliability practices, and distribution approaches across cloud providers, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments. \nAdvance observability and operability: Establish end-to-end metrics, logs, traces, structured events, dashboards, alerting, service-level objectives, operational diagnostics, and runbooks for workflows, pipelines, event streams, and platform services. \nPartner with downstream teams: Work directly with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, test, infrastructure, product, and customer-facing teams to turn recurring distributed-systems problems into reusable platform capabilities. \nKey Outcomes:\nThe Forge Platform continues to improve in KPIs around reliability, scalability, operational use cases, and customer adoption. \nNew services from downstream teams are guided to successful platform integration. Shared distributed services have clear ownership, repeatable deployment patterns, tested recovery procedures, practical observability, and well-defined operational standards. \nThe Platform is demonstrated, evaluated, and benchmarked across a wide variety of operational environments. \nInterfaces are maintained for long periods of time to instill customer confidence and reduce upgrade burdens. \nRequired qualifications:\nSignificant experience designing and operating production distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, backend infrastructure, or data-intensive services. \nStrong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in Go and Python. \nDeep understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including failure handling, idempotency, consistency tradeoffs, retries, ordering, delivery semantics, backpressure, partitioning, state management, and fault tolerance. \nExperience designing or operating workflow orchestration, distributed job execution, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, or long-running service workflows. \nAbility to define architecture and technical standards while remaining hands-on in implementation, production troubleshooting, performance analysis, and reliability improvement. \nExperience working across multiple teams to turn recurring infrastructure needs into reusable, well-documented platform capabilities. \nClear technical communication and the ability to make complex distributed-systems architecture understandable to both specialists and downstream users. \nPreferred qualifications:\nExperience in any of the following is beneficial but not required:\nKubernetes controllers, operators, Custom Resource Definitions, admission control, scheduling extensions, KubeRay, or workload-management systems. \nDistributed execution and workflow technologies such as Ray, Temporal, Argo Workflows, Flyte, Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, Kubernetes Jobs, or comparable systems. \nDurable messaging and event-streaming technologies such as NATS JetStream, Kafka, Redpanda, Pulsar, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS, or comparable systems. \nETL/ELT, batch processing, event-driven data pipelines, CDC, schema evolution, data validation, artifact processing, or large-file transfer workflows. \nService networking technologies and practices such as Envoy, service meshes, Kubernetes networking, and CNI plugins. \nObservability software such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Jaeger, distributed tracing, structured logging, SLOs, service-level indicators, alerting, and incident-management practices. \nTerraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitOps, Kubernetes package management, repeatable platform distribution, and Infrastructure as Code. \nWhy join us:\nPlatform Engineering is foundational to how Shield AI develops, tests, evaluates, deploys, and operates autonomy systems. This role offers the opportunity to shape the distributed systems foundation used by engineering teams across the company and delivered into demanding customer environments.\nYour work will determine how reliably data moves through the organization, how services coordinate across complex environments, how teams execute and recover long-running workflows, and how operators understand the health of mission-critical systems. You will work at the intersection of Kubernetes, distributed computing, event-driven architecture, data processing, networking, observability, and autonomy.\nYou will help establish reusable platform capabilities that allow specialized teams-including autonomy, simulation, test, ML Ops, and application engineering-to move faster while building on dependable operational foundations.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6430,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Military Drones","Defense Manufacturing","Defense AI","Drone AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T20:07:33Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-19T00:04:52Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-10-19T03:09:01Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-22T16:07:18Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-10-22T20:04:14Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":0,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 2","filings_12m":2,"filings_prev_12m":2,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":132500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-14T07:33:33+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":38,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":0.6,"age_days":52,"expected_fill_days":62,"reasons":["conf:5","stale_co","velocity","win:late","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-14T05:58:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":290000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-14T14:44:51Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":15825,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":50},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=50"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fshield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fshield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/shield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1123589}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"shield.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1123589},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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