Senior Staff AI Platform Engineer—Kubernetes-native

Fdetimes; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to help define and build the AI Factory Reference Architecture, a Kubernetes-native platform for AI development, distributed training, simulation, evaluation, and deployment. You will partner with ML researchers, platform engineers, and autonomy teams to deliver an exceptional developer experience for training and deploying modern AI models.

Success in this role requires balancing researcher productivity, platform simplicity, operational excellence,

Qualifications

• Experience building Kubernetes-native AI or MLOps platforms.
• Deep understanding of modern AI training frameworks (PyTorch, Transformers).
• Experience operating GPU-accelerated infrastructure and distributed training systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of an AI Factory Reference Architecture on Kubernetes.
• Partner with ML researchers to support training workflows and AI frameworks.
• Design self-service AI development workflows from local experiments to distributed execution.
• Build infrastructure for distributed training, simulation, inference, and RL workloads, with scalable orchestration and resource management.

Skills

Kubernetes-native AI

Distributed ML workloads

PyTorch

Transformers (Hugging Face)

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to help define and build the AI Factory Reference Architecture, a Kubernetes-native platform for AI development, distributed training, simulation, evaluation, and deployment. You will partner with ML researchers, platform engineers, and autonomy teams to deliver an exceptional developer experience for training and deploying modern AI models.

Success in this role requires balancing researcher productivity, platform simplicity, operational excellence,