Senior AI Platform Engineer — Scale & Reliability

Cornerstone Research; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 215,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Cornerstone Research in Washington, DC, and other major U.S. hubs seeks a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale AI infrastructure.

You will co‑own the platform layer, including inference gateways and observability tooling, while enabling developers to ship AI agents efficiently. You will partner with platform engineers and product teams to harden and extend capabilities, ensuring confidentiality, isolation, and reliability across environments.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software, platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering experience, or a Master/PhD in a quantitative field with 2+ years of industry experience.
• Strong fundamentals in system design with the ability to build reliable systems for sensitive data.
• Demonstrated ability to work across tech stacks and pick up new languages quickly.
• Experience using AI-powered coding assistants to accelerate development.
• Familiarity with building AI agents and running them safely in sandboxed environments.
• Deep, practical experience with environment isolation and container solutions like Docker/Podman/Bubblewrap.
• Hands-on experience with metrics, logging, and distributed tracing (Grafana/OpenTelemetry).
• Excellent written and verbal communication of technical tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the systems and shared infrastructure that AI applications at the firm depend on.
• Own metrics, logs, and traces; instrument services, build dashboards and alerts.
• Improve resilience, security posture, and operational maturity of existing systems.
• Provide tooling, environments, and deployment paths for developers to ship AI agents and workflows safely.
• Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and IT to deliver platform capabilities that fit how the firm works.

Skills

Platform design

Observability

Containers

Distributed tracing

Communication

AI-native development

Education

BA/BS

Master or PhD in quantitative field

Tools

Docker

Podman

Bubblewrap

Kubernetes

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Nginx

Terraform

Job description

Cornerstone Research in Washington, DC, and other major U.S. hubs seeks a Senior Software Engineer to design and scale AI infrastructure.

You will co‑own the platform layer, including inference gateways and observability tooling, while enabling developers to ship AI agents efficiently. You will partner with platform engineers and product teams to harden and extend capabilities, ensuring confidentiality, isolation, and reliability across environments.