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Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to design and implement internal technology platforms powering engineering, autonomy, and enterprise operations. This is a highly technical individual contributor role based in San Diego, CA, with flexibility for Dallas, TX; Washington, D.C.; or other Shield AI locations.
You will serve as a senior technical expert responsible for designing and evolving scalable, secure, and highly automated platform infrastructure spanning cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. Working closely with engineering, security, and infrastructure teams, you will establish platform architecture, develop paved paths for developers, and implement automation that improves reliability, security, and development productivity across engineering teams.
Key responsibilities include:
**Platform Architecture & Engineering**
- Build and evolve scalable internal platform infrastructure supporting engineering workloads across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments.
- Design and implement platform capabilities enabling standardized, secure, and repeatable application deployment.
- Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code frameworks and reusable platform modules to accelerate engineering productivity.
- Establish and evolve "paved path" platform patterns that simplify secure software delivery for engineering teams.
**Automation & Developer Enablement**
- Build automation and developer tooling that improves software delivery and engineering productivity.
- Contribute to and improve CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, and developer platform tooling.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to reduce operational friction and improve system observability, resilience, and reliability.
- Develop internal tools, platform integrations, and automation frameworks that streamline engineering workflows.
**Infrastructure & Systems Engineering**
- Design, implement, and operate highly available infrastructure platforms supporting mission-critical engineering systems.
- Implement scalable platform solutions across cloud and on-prem environments including compute, networking, identity, and storage.
- Partner with security teams to embed strong security controls, auditability, and compliance requirements into platform architectures.
- Evaluate and introduce new technologies that improve system scalability, security, and operational efficiency.
Shield AI's products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. The company operates globally with offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
**Requirements**
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering roles supporting large-scale systems.
- Deep hands-on experience designing, building, and operating cloud or hybrid infrastructure platforms, including networking, identity, compute, and storage systems.
- Strong expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, or similar).
- Experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines, developer platform tooling, and automated deployment workflows.
- Strong systems engineering background across Linux-based environments, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation using scripting or programming languages (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, etc.).
- Demonstrated ability to understand, build, and own complex platform initiatives and collaborate across engineering and infrastructure teams.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering teams.
**Preferred Qualifications**
- Experience building or operating internal developer platforms (IDP) or engineering productivity platforms supporting large-scale development environments.
- Experience with Kubernetes and modern container platforms.
- Experience deploying infrastructure across commercial and government cloud environments, including AWS and Azure.
- Familiarity with DevSecOps practices and integrating security controls into automated infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience implementing observability platforms, including centralized logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing for large-scale systems.
- Experience working within defense, aerospace, or other regulated industries, including familiarity with frameworks such as NIST or FedRAMP.
