Staff Platform Engineer

Zencoder; United States; Remote; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Equity

Founder mentorship

Job summary

Zencoder is seeking an experienced engineering lead to raise the bar on how software is built, tested, shipped, and operated. You’ll work hands-on with code, infra, and pipelines to raise the ceiling across the org for AI agents and human engineers alike.

You’ll define standards, build leverage, and help teams level up workflows, tooling, security posture, and delivery practices across CI/CD, testing, IaC, and observability.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background.
• Experience designing and building internal platforms - the judgment to know what to abstract, what to expose, and what to leave alone.
• Deep experience with CI/CD, automated testing, IaC, and developer tooling.
• Strong grasp of modern software security and secure delivery practices (shift-left / SecDevOps).
• A product mindset toward internal tooling - treating engineers and agents as users, and measuring whether the platform actually makes them faster.
• Real fluency with AI coding agents - how they work, where they fail, and what makes them effective.
• Understanding e2e test frameworks such as Playwright and how to scale them is a big plus.

Responsibilities

• Shape the platform and infrastructure that everything else runs on — the foundations product teams build on top of.
• Improve the full dev loop: local development, CI/CD, deployment, and production feedback.
• Define and drive standards around testing, IaC, observability, and secure delivery — and help product teams adopt them.
• Build shared tooling, templates, and golden paths that create real leverage — paved roads teams actually want to use.
• Own secure delivery end-to-end: unify security scanning, secrets management, dependency and supply-chain controls, and pen-testing workflows into the core pipeline so secure-by-default is the path of least resistance.
• Stay ahead of the shifting security landscape as AI agents reshape both how vulnerabilities emerge and how they're exploited.
• Shape repos, tooling, and conventions so coding agents can navigate them efficiently — clear structure, good test signal, fast feedback loops, well-scoped contexts, and docs agents can actually use.
• Measure impact against DORA metrics and qualitative signals from engineering teams.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Internal platform design

CI/CD

Automated testing

IaC

Developer tooling

Security (SecDevOps)

AI coding agents

Playwright familiarity

Tools

Playwright

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

At Zencoder.ai , we build and orchestrate AI agents that ship real work - code, research, operations, and more. What started as developer tooling is becoming a platform where people and agents collaborate across knowledge work tasks.

The Opportunity

We're looking for an experienced engineer to raise the bar on how our organization builds, tests, ships, and operates software - for both human engineers and AI coding agents.

This is AI harness engineering: the discipline of making the fundamentals (CI/CD, testing, IaC, observability, secure delivery) so solid and well-shaped that agents can work productively inside them. Developer experience and platform engineering are a subset of that work. When the harness is good, humans ship faster and agents stop getting stuck on things that shouldn't be hard.

Security is inseparable from this. AI agents are accelerating both the pace and the shape of vulnerabilities, and secure delivery has to be built into the same stream as everything else - not bolted on.

Product teams own their services, pipelines, and tests. Your job is to raise the ceiling across the org - defining standards, building leverage, and helping teams level up their workflows, tooling, infrastructure, security posture, and necessary changes for AI Agents.

Key Responsibilities

This is a hands-on lead role - you'll set direction and be deep in the code, infra, and pipelines yourself. A lead here is very much a builder.

• Shape the platform and infrastructure that everything else runs on — the foundations product teams build on top of
• Improve the full dev loop: local development, CI/CD, deployment, and production feedback
• Define and drive standards around testing, IaC, observability, and secure delivery — and help product teams adopt them
• Build shared tooling, templates, and golden paths that create real leverage — paved roads teams actually want to use
• Own secure delivery end-to-end: unify security scanning, secrets management, dependency and supply-chain controls, and pen-testing workflows into the core pipeline so secure-by-default is the path of least resistance
• Stay ahead of the shifting security landscape as AI agents reshape both how vulnerabilities emerge and how they're exploited
• Shape repos, tooling, and conventions so coding agents can navigate them efficiently — clear structure, good test signal, fast feedback loops, well-scoped contexts, and docs agents can actually use
• Measure impact against DORA metrics and qualitative signals from engineering teams

Essential Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background
• Experience designing and building internal platforms - the judgment to know what to abstract, what to expose, and what to leave alone
• Deep experience with CI/CD, automated testing, IaC, and developer tooling
• Strong grasp of modern software security and secure delivery practices (shift-left / SecDevOps)
• A product mindset toward internal tooling - treating engineers and agents as users, and measuring whether the platform actually makes them faster
• Real fluency with AI coding agents - how they work, where they fail, and what makes them effective
• Understanding e2e test frameworks such as Playwright and how to scale them is a big plus

Why Join Zencoder?

• Shape the Future of Software Creation: We’re not just improving how developers write code — we’re redefining how ideas turn into reality. By closing the gap between concept and execution, we’re creating tools that will influence every industry that relies on software.
• Massive Impact, Real Ownership: At Zencoder, you’ll have full visibility into how your work moves the product and the company forward. You’ll ship features that matter, see the immediate impact of your decisions, and get feedback directly from users — fast.
• ICs Are the Core: Individual Contributors are the highest-status role at Zencoder. Our culture celebrates those who lead by doing — who create momentum, inspire others, and turn ideas into shipped products.
• High-Caliber Team & Founder: Work alongside exceptional AI and software engineers, and learn directly from Andrew Filev, founder of a unicorn startup, who brings deep expertise in scaling world-class technology companies.
• Global & Flexible: We hire talent, not coordinates. Work from wherever you’re happiest and most productive — as long as you bring the energy, focus, and results.
• Aligned Incentives: Our equity plan ensures that when we succeed, you succeed. Your impact compounds as the company grows.

Zencoder is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.