Staff Data Platform Engineer: Graph API & DataOps

f7d8749a-72d6-407c-bf98-292ea630c73a; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI in San Diego is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to define and build the data foundation of the AI Factory. You will design platform architecture and implement production software that unifies configurations, data, and models.

The role is a hands-on technical leadership position balancing developer productivity, reliability, portability, and long-term maintainability across cloud and edge environments.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating distributed data solutions.
• Strong software engineering in Go and Python.
• Deep understanding of data modeling, APIs, and schema evolution.
• Experience with multiple storage modalities and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Develop a unifying Graph API for knowledge graph based workflows.
• Own DataOps infrastructure across storage, indexing, queries, and compute.
• Establish durable schema patterns and evolution practices.
• Build APIs for agentic data access beyond keyword or vector search.
• Develop reference architectures for storage and compute profiles.
• Collaborate with autonomy, ML, test, infra, product teams to turn workflows into platform capabilities.
• Create integrations for data from simulations, test infrastructure, and edge devices.
• Improve developer experience with self-service APIs, SDKs, and diagnostics.
• Guide build-versus-buy decisions and technology direction.
• Raise observability, reliability, security, and data governance standards.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed data systems

Kubernetes

Linux

API design

Tools

Terraform

Helm

GitOps

Kafka

Ray

Job description

Shield AI in San Diego is seeking a Staff Data Platform Engineer to define and build the data foundation of the AI Factory. You will design platform architecture and implement production software that unifies configurations, data, and models.

The role is a hands-on technical leadership position balancing developer productivity, reliability, portability, and long-term maintainability across cloud and edge environments.