Senior Platform Engineer — Edge Frameworks & FDE Tooling

Conduit; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Conduit is seeking an experienced Python backend engineer to design and ship production services and the infrastructure that runs them. You will build generic, reusable platforms, write golden-path docs, and own deployment tooling.

You will collaborate across ML, frontend, robotics, and FDE teams to turn field pain into platform capabilities, while working in-person in San Francisco and occasionally traveling to customer sites.

Qualifications

• Proven experience designing and shipping production services and the infra to run them.
• Built generic, reusable services at scale and the underlying framework or platform.
• Able to author excellent docs, scaffolding, and examples that downstream engineers actually use.
• Willingness to work in-person in San Francisco and travel to customer sites as needed.

Responsibilities

• Design the generic microservice abstractions that the fleet is built on and evolve 40+ integrations into config-driven adapters.
• Own the paved road and define production-grade standards, tooling, and validation gates for near-production integrations.
• Make standing up a new factory repeatable with self-serve provisioning playbooks and clear guardrails.
• Own end-to-end infra, DevOps, and release pipelines with versioned manifests, CI/CD, and on‑prem orchestration.
• Collaborate across ML, frontend, robotics, and FDE teams to turn field pain into platform capabilities.

Skills

Python

DevOps

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Docker

GitHub Actions

ROS2

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Infrastructure as code

Job description

Conduit's FactoryOS platform allows manufacturers to scale production-ready automation solutions in days, not months. With a suite of powerful applications, we let manufacturers automate faster and smarter by coordinating every robot, machine, and system on one platform. At Conduit, our mission is to give every American manufacturer the power to automate their factories at lightning speed.

We're already deployed in production at top manufacturers and growing fast. Backed by leading investors, and built by a team that moves at startup speed with deep conviction in American industrial dominance.

The Role

Conduit is building a factory operating system to power manufacturers across the globe. Combining custom hardware, on-prem compute, and an end-to-end software stack, we're actively controlling robots, automating tasks, and accelerating the world's industrial base.

This role sits at the core of that stack — the OFL (One Factory Language). OFL is our vendor-agnostic standard that normalizes any machine, robot, sensor, or vision system, plus the framework and tooling that let us deploy it to a new factory floor in hours, not weeks. You’ll own the integration framework, the dev and deployment tooling, and the paved-road guides that let an FDE stand up a near-production-grade integration on a first site visit — then keep raising that floor so the next integration is easier than the last.

If you like the idea of writing one abstraction that absorbs the next twenty vendor integrations, and infrastructure that an FDE can run from a factory floor without calling you, this is the seat.

What you'll do

• Design the generic microservice abstractions that the whole fleet is built on. Evolve primitives already in use in 40+ integrations so the next is a config and a thin adapter, not a new service. Get the abstraction right and the platform scales itself; get it wrong and every FDE pays for it.
• Own the paved road and define “production-grade”, the framework, scaffolding, quality bar and validation gates that let an FDE produce a near-production-grade integration on a first site visit without you in the room.
• Make standing up a new factory repeatable. Turn provisioning playbooks into reliable, self-serve workflows that FDEs, and eventually customers, can run without platform-team handholding. Fold lessons back into the framework, guides, and guardrails so the floor rises and the next integration starts closer to production. Your leverage is generalizing the fix into the platform, not productionizing each driver by hand.
• Own the infra, service-definition, DevOps, and release pipeline end to end. Versioned manifests, GitHub Actions, ECR image builds, IaaC, deployment automation, health/metrics/logging, and the on-prem orchestrator. Make releases boring, reversible, and observable.
• Collaborate across ML, frontend, robotics, and the FDE team to turn recurring field pain into platform capabilities and go to the floor yourself to experience, learn, and build.

Who You Are

• Strong Python backend engineer who has designed and shipped production services and the infrastructure to run them, not just contributed features to someone else's system.
• Proven track record building generic, reusable services at scale, abstractions, frameworks, or platforms that other engineers built on top of.
• Built platforms people actually adopt — you’ve written the golden-path docs, scaffolding, and examples, and iterated them based on how downstream engineers really used (and abused) your framework. A framework no one can self-serve isn’t leverage.
• Hands-on DevOps/infra chops: Docker, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment automation, with real opinions on versioning, rollout, and rollback.
• Comfortable owning deployment and operations across distributed/edge environments, remote hosts, constrained networks, and "it has to just work when I'm not there" reliability.
• Can justify design decisions, name the tradeoffs, recognize over-engineering, and simplify.
• Availability to work in-person in San Francisco and occasionally travel onsite to customers.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure as code at production scale
• Deep experience with ROS2 or other distributed pub/sub and high-frequency data streaming — DDS, MQTT, Kafka, ZeroMQ, or RabbitMQ
• Has owned a versioned, shared interface contract that many downstream services build on — and the discipline of evolving it without breaking every consumer (shared schemas, IDL, protobuf, or interface packages across a fleet or monorepo).
• Built plugin systems, SDKs, or framework-style codebases designed for many downstream integrations
• Edge / on-prem / air-gapped deployment experience, including config management (Ansible) and golden-image provisioning
• Serverless/cloud backend experience (AWS Lambda, API Gateway) and time-series/relational data at scale
• Familiarity with manufacturing processes, MES/ERP systems, or IIoT
• Forward-deployed or field-engineering experience — you've debugged something live, on a customer's site
• Top-tier pay and equity. We want to make it easy to join Conduit.
• Generational opportunity. Be early at a company defining the software layer for industrial automation.
• American re-industrialization is happening. We're building the platform to make it real faster.
• Zero bureaucracy. High impact. You'll be on the front lines, solving real problems for real factories.
• You will level up. You'll work directly with the founder and exec team — and grow into a senior operator.

Interested candidates should email their resume to [e-mail]

Conduit is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates.