Senior Platform Engineer
San Diego, California / San Mateo, California / Dallas, Texas / Seattle, Washington / Washington, DC
Enterprise Operations Division - Cloud & Infrastructure /
Full Time Employee /
Hybrid
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Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI's technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description
This position may be based in San Diego or San Mateo, CA; Dallas, TX; the Seattle-Tacoma, WA area; Washington, D.C.; and Boston, MA.
Shield AI is seeking a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the shared technology platforms that support our engineering, autonomy development, and enterprise operations environments.
As part of the Cloud & Infrastructure team within Enterprise Operations, this role will develop standardized infrastructure, automation, and developer-facing capabilities across Shield AI's public and private cloud environments. You will partner closely with Engineering, DevOps, Infrastructure, Network, and Cybersecurity teams to deliver scalable, secure, and reliable platform services that reduce manual operations and improve developer productivity.
What you'll do:
- Design, build, and operate scalable platform infrastructure across Azure, AWS, and private cloud environments.
- Develop reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, automation frameworks, and self-service platform capabilities for engineering teams.
- Own platform initiatives from technical design and implementation through production operations and continuous improvement.
- Build and maintain container and Kubernetes platform capabilities, including deployment automation, configuration management, observability, and lifecycle management.
- Develop platform tooling and automation using technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Python, and Go.
- Build standardized paved paths that simplify infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and access to shared platform services.
- Establish and maintain platform standards for reliability, scalability, security, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Support capacity planning, performance tuning, vulnerability remediation, disaster recovery, and platform lifecycle management.
- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging, alerting, and other developer-facing platform services.
- Troubleshoot complex platform, infrastructure, and application integration issues and lead root-cause analysis.
- Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, technical documentation, operational procedures, and reusable implementation patterns.
- Evaluate emerging technologies and recommend solutions that improve automation, reliability, and developer productivity.
- Provide technical guidance to other engineers and contribute to platform architecture, standards, and roadmap decisions.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and scheduled after-hours maintenance as needed.
Required Qualifications:
- 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Experience designing and operating production infrastructure in Azure, AWS, or comparable public cloud environments.
- Strong experience developing reusable infrastructure-as-code modules and automation using tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
- Hands-on experience deploying and operating containerized workloads and Kubernetes-based platforms.
- Proficiency in Python, Go, or another programming language used to build platform tooling and automation.
- Experience building CI/CD pipelines, self-service infrastructure capabilities, or developer-facing platform services.
- Strong Linux systems administration experience, including deployment, configuration, troubleshooting, patching, and performance analysis.
- Working knowledge of cloud and enterprise networking, including VPCs/VNets, subnets, routing, VPNs, load balancing, DNS, and firewalls.
- Experience implementing monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability for production platforms.
- Understanding of platform security, identity and access management, vulnerability remediation, and secure configuration practices.
- Ability to independently lead complex technical initiatives from design through production deployment.
- Strong technical documentation, communication, collaboration, and organizational skills.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience supporting commercial, government, regulated, classified, or air-gapped cloud environments.
- Experience with both Microsoft Azure and AWS, including Azure Government or AWS GovCloud.
- Experience with GitOps, Helm, policy as code, secrets management, service catalogs, or internal developer portals.
- Experience designing or supporting internal developer platforms and standardized paved-path tooling.
- Knowledge of private cloud and virtualization platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V, or KVM.
- Experience defining service-level indicators, service-level objectives, incident response practices, and reliability improvements.
- Experience supporting hybrid-cloud architectures spanning public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure.
- Experience within aerospace, defense, manufacturing, or other regulated environments.
- Relevant cloud, Kubernetes, Terraform, or platform-engineering certifications.
$141,000 - $212,000 a year
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Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
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