Principal Autonomous Platform Engineer for Production AI

STN, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Horizon AI is building the operating system for how organizations run themselves. The role seeks a Principal-level engineer to make a fast-moving platform dependable enough for autonomous action and to serve as technical deputy when the Chief Architect is unavailable.

Initial focus is reliability: agents already act on production infrastructure, and we will expand trust only as the dispatch layer becomes robust. The candidate will own orchestration and drive infrastructure improvements.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineer with senior-level distributed systems experience.
• Experience taking a fast-built system to production dependability: idempotency, circuit breaking, backpressure, and degradation that is observable.
• Proficiency in Python and Java; comfortable with backend services, data infrastructure, and rapid deployment in the same week.
• Judgment about orchestration and scaling grounded in operating systems; ability to reduce novel problems to working code quickly.

Responsibilities

• Fix dispatch reliability with circuit breakers, retry semantics, health-aware routing, and error handling that surfaces failures.
• Add the caching layer, then the event streaming backbone.
• Own the orchestration decision, whether to stay as-is, move to Kubernetes, or something between, and then execute it.
• Introduce infrastructure-as-code and real deployment practice - Refactor toward per-session isolation so concurrent agent runs are safe.
• Own cross-cutting concerns: service scaffolding standards, testing strategy, CI, and observability of our own platform.
• Rotate through Systems and SRE embeds.

Skills

Distributed systems

Production-ready systems

Python

Java

Backend services

Data infrastructure

Deployment

Tools

Kubernetes

Event streaming

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Horizon AI is building the operating system for how organizations run themselves. The role seeks a Principal-level engineer to make a fast-moving platform dependable enough for autonomous action and to serve as technical deputy when the Chief Architect is unavailable.

Initial focus is reliability: agents already act on production infrastructure, and we will expand trust only as the dispatch layer becomes robust. The candidate will own orchestration and drive infrastructure improvements.