Senior Platform Engineer – AI/ML Infrastructure

StratITech; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

StratITech in San Francisco is seeking an experienced Infrastructure Engineer to design and own the platform from ground up. You will work with a small senior team to tackle end-to-end infrastructure challenges, from architecture to production ownership.

You will build scalable systems on Kubernetes and cloud, write automation in Python/Go, and shape the infrastructure roadmap as the company grows.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant software, systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering experience.
• Ownership of significant infrastructure or platform projects from architecture through production.
• Strong hands-on Linux and systems fundamentals.
• Production experience with Kubernetes beyond basic deployments.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience, ideally Terraform.
• Experience building production automation, platform software, internal tooling, controllers, or infrastructure systems.
• Experience with modern deployment and CI/CD practices; strong troubleshooting and architectural judgment.
• Comfort working independently in ambiguous environments with ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production infrastructure and platform capabilities from the ground up.
• Own substantial projects from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, and production.
• Build infrastructure software, automation, internal tooling, and self-service capabilities that make other engineers faster.
• Design and evolve systems running across Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, distributed services, networking, storage, and data-intensive workloads.
• Write production software and automation in languages such as Python, Go, or similar systems/backend languages.
• Build and improve Infrastructure as Code and automated provisioning using Terraform or comparable tooling.
• Diagnose difficult production problems across application, compute, network, storage, and infrastructure layers.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing performance, reliability, security, cost, and complexity.
• Help shape the technical direction of the infrastructure platform as the company scales.

Skills

Linux

Kubernetes

Terraform

IaC

CI/CD

Distributed systems

Ownership

Go/Python

Job description

Work Arrangement: Onsite, 5 days/week

Employment Type: Full-Time, W-2

Work Authorization: Candidates must be currently authorized to work in the United States. This position is not eligible for new or future employer-sponsored work authorization.

Note: No C2C arrangements will be considered.

Any attempt to use personal or household contact information for solicitation, candidate submission, or vendor outreach is strictly prohibited and will be reported to LinkedIn.

About the Role

We are recruiting for a fast-growing San Francisco AI company building high-performance infrastructure and software for some of the most demanding data and compute workloads in production.

This is not a traditional SRE role focused primarily on keeping existing systems running.

We are looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer who wants to build the platform itself.

You'll work with a small, senior engineering team and own meaningful infrastructure problems end to end—from understanding what needs to exist, through architecture and technical tradeoffs, to hands-on implementation, rollout, and production ownership.

There won't always be a ticket telling you what to build next. The strongest engineers here are comfortable starting with a company objective, understanding the surrounding systems, and figuring out where their work can have the greatest impact.

What You'll Do

• Design and build production infrastructure and platform capabilities from the ground up.
• Own substantial projects from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, and production.
• Build infrastructure software, automation, internal tooling, and self-service capabilities that make other engineers faster.
• Design and evolve systems running across Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, distributed services, networking, storage, and data-intensive workloads.
• Write production software and automation in languages such as Python, Go, or similar systems/backend languages.
• Build and improve Infrastructure as Code and automated provisioning using Terraform or comparable tooling.
• Diagnose difficult production problems across application, compute, network, storage, and infrastructure layers.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing performance, reliability, security, cost, and complexity.
• Help shape the technical direction of the infrastructure platform as the company scales.

What We're Looking For

You may come from platform engineering, infrastructure software, distributed systems, developer infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, or a deeply technical SRE background.

What matters most is what you have personally built and owned.

Strong candidates will bring:

• Approximately 8+ years of relevant software, systems, infrastructure, or platform engineering experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of significant infrastructure or platform projects from architecture through production.
• Strong hands-on experience with Linux and systems fundamentals.
• Production experience with Kubernetes beyond simply deploying applications to an existing cluster.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience, ideally Terraform.
• Programming experience building production automation, platform software, internal tooling, controllers, services, or infrastructure systems.
• Experience with modern deployment and CI/CD practices.Strong distributed-systems troubleshooting and architectural judgment.
• Comfort working independently in ambiguous environments with substantial technical ownership.

Especially Interesting Experience

You do not need everything below. These are differentiators, not a keyword checklist.

• Building infrastructure at an early-stage or rapidly scaling company.
• Founding or early platform/infrastructure engineering experience.
• Kubernetes controllers, operators, cluster lifecycle, scheduling, or control-plane engineering.
• Internal developer platforms or self-service infrastructure.
• High-performance or distributed computing systems.
• GPU infrastructure, NVIDIA systems, AI/ML training or inference platforms.
• Bare-metal, datacenter, networking, or storage infrastructure.
• Kafka, Spark, Airflow, Ray, Databricks, or other large-scale data systems.
• GitOps, ArgoCD, Helm, service mesh, or advanced Kubernetes platform tooling.
• Performance-sensitive systems where architecture-not just additional capacity-was required to scale.

You’ll Probably Enjoy This Role If...

You like being handed a difficult objective rather than a tightly scoped ticket.

You naturally ask:

What should exist here? Why should we build it this way? What are the tradeoffs? How can we make this simpler for everyone else?

You enjoy writing software as much as infrastructure code, working across layers when necessary, and taking responsibility for the system after it reaches production.

You want to work with experienced engineers who expect one another to think independently, communicate clearly, and take deep ownership of their work.

Why Join

• Real ownership: Own meaningful parts of the platform rather than a narrow operational slice.
• 0-1 engineering: Build new infrastructure capabilities as the company's technical environment evolves.
• High-performance systems: Work on challenging distributed, data-intensive, and AI infrastructure problems.
• Small senior team: Your technical decisions can materially influence how the platform is built.
• Hands-on engineering: Architecture here means designing and implementing, not handing designs to another team.
• Equity and impact: Join at a stage where individual engineers can still have an outsized effect on both the technology and the company.