Senior Data Platform Engineer for AI Infrastructure

AI Chopping Block; San Diego (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI in San Diego is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to define and build a unified data foundation for AI workflows. You will lead architecture, implement production software, and balance productivity with reliability across data storage, graphs, and compute infrastructure.

You will partner with ML, autonomy, test, and product teams to deliver reusable platform capabilities, data provenance, and scalable APIs for mission-critical AI systems.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating distributed data solutions, storage systems, or data-intensive backend services.
• Strong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in Go and Python.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, API design, schema evolution, identity, consistency, indexing, query planning, and data lifecycle concerns.
• Experience with multiple storage modalities, such as relational or graph databases, object storage, analytical or columnar systems, and file storage.
• Experience designing reliable ingestion and access paths for high-volume data.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, Linux, networking, security, storage, observability, and distributed-systems fundamentals.
• Experience deploying data infrastructure across cloud or customer-managed environments using modern Infrastructure as Code and platform engineering practices.
• Ability to evaluate technologies through prototypes, benchmarks, operational requirements, and total lifecycle cost rather than feature lists alone.
• Experience defining architecture and technical standards while remaining hands-on in implementation and debugging.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, test teams, platform engineers, and product stakeholders.
• Clear technical communication and the ability to make complex data architecture understandable to both specialists and downstream users.

Responsibilities

• Develop a unifying Graph API and backbone for human, service, and agentic workflows.
• Own DataOps infrastructure and maintain storage, indexing, query, ingestion, and compute components.
• Establish durable patterns for schema modeling, relationships, and lineage.
• Build APIs enabling agents to access structured, connected context beyond keyword similarity.
• Develop reference architectures for storage, compute, and deployment patterns.
• Collaborate with autonomy, ML, test, infrastructure, product, and customer teams.
• Deliver integrations for data from simulations, testing, training systems, and edge devices.
• Create self-service APIs, SDKs, tools, and diagnostics to simplify data modeling and ingestion.
• Evaluate emerging data/AI infra technologies and guide build vs buy decisions.
• Raise observability, reliability, security, data integrity, and lifecycle management standards.

Skills

Distributed data systems

Go

Python

Data modeling

API design

Kubernetes

Linux

Infrastructure as Code

Cost analysis

Technical communication

Tools

Graph databases

OpenAPI

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

Shield AI in San Diego is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to define and build a unified data foundation for AI workflows. You will lead architecture, implement production software, and balance productivity with reliability across data storage, graphs, and compute infrastructure.

You will partner with ML, autonomy, test, and product teams to deliver reusable platform capabilities, data provenance, and scalable APIs for mission-critical AI systems.