Staff Platform Engineer

TruckSmarter; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full health, dental and vision coverage

Daily catered lunch in-office

Flexible PTO

401k

Commuter benefits

Job summary

A dynamic tech startup in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to lead the infrastructure for its AI-powered product. This high-impact role involves defining architectural direction, maintaining reliable AWS infrastructure, and mentoring fellow engineers. The ideal candidate has over 7 years of experience in production environments and a strong command of AWS services. The company values in-person collaboration and offers full health benefits, catered lunches, and flexible PTO.

Qualifications

• Experience building and scaling production infrastructure.
• Comfortable with TypeScript and Node.js or similar backend ecosystems.
• Ability to lead and influence across teams effectively.

Responsibilities

• Define architectural direction for core platform and application frameworks.
• Build and maintain reliable infrastructure across AWS.
• Mentor engineers on reliability, automation, and performance.

Skills

AWS (ECS, RDS, VPC, S3, IAM, WAF)

IaC (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform)

TypeScript

Node.js

Mentoring engineers

Incident response culture

Education

7+ years experience in production infrastructure

Job description

About TruckSmarter

Trucking moves 71% of freight in America, nearly $900 billion annually, yet the industry remains deeply fragmented and underserved by technology. TruckSmarter is fixing that, starting with the people at the center of it: truck drivers.

We're a team of less than 25 building Dispatch, a vertically-integrated AI-powered product that performs many of the repetitive, time-intensive manual operations so that our users can focus on growing their business. The product is live, drivers are using it, and we're now focused on making Dispatch more powerful for the people who depend on it every day.

The Role

We're looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to build and own the foundation that everything at TruckSmarter runs on. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role on a team of fewer than 15 engineers where you'll define and evolve core systems, drive company-wide developer velocity, and architect infrastructure that supports both our product and our growing AI workloads.

You'll operate across the full infrastructure stack, from setting direction on deployment pipelines and observability frameworks to leading security and reliability strategy and mentoring engineers across the team. At our size, your decisions set long-term technical direction and have immediate, visible impact on both the product and how the team operates.

What You'll Do

• Define the architectural direction for our core platform, including application frameworks, abstractions, and the systems that every engineer at TruckSmarter depends on
• Set the standard for how we build, deploy, and operate software across the engineering org
• Build and maintain reliable infrastructure across AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, S3, WAF, Redshift, DMS) using IaC (CDK, Terraform)
• Define and automate deployment pipelines, CI/CD, and observability frameworks
• Lead security initiatives to ensure compliance, harden systems, and improve access controls
• Drive incident response and postmortem culture to increase resilience and operational excellence
• Mentor engineers across the team on reliability, automation, and performance — not just within platform

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years building and scaling production infrastructure, including setting architectural direction for an engineering org
• Deep background in AWS (ECS, RDS, VPC, S3, IAM, WAF) and IaC (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, or similar)
• Comfortable with TypeScript and Node.js or similar backend ecosystems
• Proven ability to establish foundational platform decisions that serve as a basis for other engineers’ development
• Demonstrated ability to lead and influence across teams without relying on org structure
• Experience at a fast-moving startup where you've had to balance long-term architecture with short-term velocity
• Demonstrated experience in lieu of a formal degree is absolutely fine

Working Model

We work in-person 5 days a week at our downtown San Francisco office. We believe the best products get built when people are in the same room. Fast feedback loops, real collaboration, and a team that genuinely enjoys working together. If that's how you do your best work, you'll fit right in.

We Offer

• Full health, dental and vision coverage
• Daily catered lunch provided in-office, plus dinner covered for anyone working past 6:00pm
• Commuter benefits
• Flexible PTO
• 401k
• Commuter benefits

We would love to have you be a part of something special, and are excited to review your application.