Founding Platform Engineer: Security‑First AI Infra

Pallet; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 195,000 - 265,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Vision, and Dental benefits

401k

Paid vacation

Job summary

Pallet is building AI infrastructure for logistics in San Francisco, seeking a founding engineer to shape security and platform foundations from the ground up. This hands-on role involves writing production code, designing systems, and setting defaults the company will rely on for years.

You’ll join a team with experience from Scale AI, DoorDash, and Rippling, delivering secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure across regions with high ownership and significant impact.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software, backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering experience.
• Experience shipping production systems.
• Experience building security-sensitive systems, including authentication, authorization, secrets management, or infrastructure security.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, containers, networking, and distributed systems.
• Experience designing platforms, tooling, or abstractions that other engineers depend on.
• Comfortable moving from a blank document to a production deployment with minimal oversight.
• High ownership and strong engineering judgment.
• You write code every day and want to continue doing so.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the core platform services that power Pallet’s AI systems and developer workflows
• Design and implement authentication, authorization, secrets management, and access control systems
• Build infrastructure that operates reliably across regions and environments with clear isolation boundaries and disaster recovery capabilities
• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational tooling for production systems
• Develop internal platforms and abstractions enabling quick product engineering without compromising security or reliability
• Partner with AI and product teams to support model training, evaluation, and inference infrastructure
• Identify systemic risks and eliminate major operational, security, and reliability issues
• Own projects from architecture through production rollout

Skills

Backend engineering

Security-driven

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Authentication & access control

Production-grade coding

Ownership

Daily coding

Tools

PostgreSQL

Node.js

TypeScript

GCP

Docker

Job description

Pallet is building AI infrastructure for logistics in San Francisco, seeking a founding engineer to shape security and platform foundations from the ground up. This hands-on role involves writing production code, designing systems, and setting defaults the company will rely on for years.

You’ll join a team with experience from Scale AI, DoorDash, and Rippling, delivering secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure across regions with high ownership and significant impact.