Senior Staff Platform Engineer, AI Infra & Scale

Frontdoor Defense; United States; Hybrid; USD 173,000 - 324,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career defining work

Competitive compensation

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible work

Learning & growth

Job summary

SandboxAQ is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform, to shape scale-ready architecture for AI workloads. You will lead architectural strategy for the platform, design resilient distributed services, and mentor a team of engineers to elevate engineering excellence.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product, research, and security, delivering reliable cloud-native infrastructure, and accelerating developer velocity across our LQMs and AI systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, designing and scaling distributed systems.
• 5+ years leading high-impact engineering teams, mentoring engineers and shaping strategy.
• Expertise in cloud-native infrastructure (GCP preferred) Kubernetes at scale.
• Experience with GPU/ML infrastructure for large training and inference workloads.
• Ability to break down complex problems into incremental architectural designs.

Responsibilities

• Lead Architectural Strategy: define long-term vision for infrastructure supporting AI workloads.
• Mentor and Develop Talent: guide junior/mid engineers, raise code quality and standards.
• Systemic Problem Solving: diagnose bottlenecks and translate into scalable requirements.
• Drive Platform Excellence: build foundational services to improve developer experience.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: work with product, research and security teams.

Skills

10+ years of software development

Technical leadership

Cloud-native infrastructure

GPU/ML infrastructure

System decomposition

Job description

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform - Remote Eligible

Define and drive scalable platform architecture for AI workloads

Location: United States

Compensation: $172,800 - 324,000 USD / year

About The Role

SandboxAQ

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company's Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors.

We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders.

At SandboxAQ, we've cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we're building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact.

The Opportunity

The Platform & Infrastructure team builds the foundational services, including compute, storage, networking, and robust cloud environments that empower our scientists and engineers to innovate at scale. We are committed to building reliable, scalable systems that accelerate developer velocity and ensure the high availability of our Large Quantitative Models (LQMs).

We are looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to act as a technical leader within our Platform & Infrastructure organization. This role is central to our efforts to evolve our architectural strategy, scale our core services to meet global demand, and elevate the technical capabilities of our engineering team. You will be instrumental in breaking down complex systemic challenges into clear, actionable parts, mentoring a team of junior engineers, and setting the standard for systems excellence across the company.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Architectural Strategy: Define and execute the long-term vision for our infrastructure, designing resilient, distributed systems that support our rapidly growing AI workloads.

• Mentor and Develop Talent: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of high standards, code quality, and continuous learning.

• Systemic Problem Solving: Partner with engineering leads to diagnose complex technical bottlenecks and break down multifaceted infrastructure challenges using first principles into scalable, manageable technical requirements.

• Drive Platform Excellence: Design and implement foundational platform services that improve developer experience and reduce operational overhead across the engineering organization.

• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with product, research, and security teams to ensure our infrastructure is secure, performant, and aligned with the company's broader mission.

Essential Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of professional software development experience, with a proven track record of designing and scaling complex distributed systems.

• Demonstrated experience (5+ years) leading high-impact engineering teams, including mentoring junior engineers and influencing technical strategy at a staff level.

• Expertise in cloud-native infrastructure (GCP preferred) Kubernetes at scale.

• Expertise in GPU/ML infrastructure for large training, data-generation, and inference workloads, including GPU scheduling, optimization and high-performance networking.

• Strong ability to decompose complex technical problems into simplified, incremental, and actionable architectural designs.

Highly Desired Skills & Experience

• Deep proficiency in architectural patterns for high-throughput, low-latency services.

• Experience operating in high-growth environments where infrastructure requirements pivot rapidly due to new scientific or product discoveries.

• Experience with multi-tenant, data governance, data registries, lineage, and federated access for model tuning with high IP sensitive environments

• Worked in regulated / compliance-bound environments that have data residency, export controls, SOC2, and strict isolation requirements.

Why Join Us?

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support your health, financial well-being, and life outside of work.

• Career Defining Work: Your work will directly accelerate the discovery of better drugs and better materials, advance human health, and enable safer and more sustainable technologies by helping customers put AI Simulation capabilities into real world use.

• Compensation: Competitive base salary, performance-based incentives or bonuses (where applicable), and equity participation.

• Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents with generous employer premium contributions, retirement savings with company matching, paid parental leave, and inclusive family-building benefits.

• Work-Life Balance: Fully remote, Flexible paid time off, company-wide seasonal breaks, and support for flexible work arrangements that enable sustainable performance.

• Learning and Growth: Opportunities for continuous learning and growth through on-the-job development, cross-functional collaboration, and access to internal learning and development programs.

SandboxAQ Welcomes All

We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging and respect, where diverse perspectives are actively sought and valued. Our multidisciplinary environment provides ample opportunity for continuous growth - working alongside humble, empowered, and ambitious colleagues ready to tackle epic challenges.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status.

Accommodations: We provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in job application procedures for open roles. If you need such an accommodation, please let a member of our Recruiting team know.