Staff Platform Engineer

Socrates; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical, dental, vision benefits

Flexible time off

Company-wide breaks

Job summary

Socrates is an AI-native platform for a new generation of business software. We are fully remote and operate with an async-first approach, shipping critical foundational systems in weeks rather than quarters.

You will own AWS architecture, CI/CD, and the agentic subsystems that power our platform, collaborating across time zones and through privacy-preserving, scalable infrastructure. As a founding or early-stage engineer, you will shape the direction of our infra, security, and data tooling

Qualifications

• 7.5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep, hands-on AWS experience managing production infrastructure.
• Polyglot engineer: TypeScript, Python, GoLang (and more).
• Founding or early-stage engineering experience with high ambiguity.
• Daily, practical relationship with AI tooling and its impact on code and infra.
• Mac-based development environment with strong communication across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Own AWS architecture, security boundaries, tenancy isolation, and cost attribution.
• Drive CI/CD and developer experience on a small, multi-person team.
• Work on agentic subsystems: review, monitoring, deployment triage, retrieval and context injection, evaluation, tracing.
• Maintain the harness: sandboxes, credentials, MCP connections and tool integrations (Cursor, Claude Code).
• Develop infrastructure-as-code and observability for our Postgres, containers, domains, and automation.

Skills

AWS architecture

CI/CD

Polyglot development

TypeScript

Python

GoLang

Founding/early-stage eng

AI tooling usage

Mac-based development

Cross-time-zone communication

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Postgres

Job description

About us

Socrates is an AI-native platform for a new generation of business software. We bring models, data, agents, and applications together so companies can replace disconnected systems with software built around how they work. The underlying infrastructure is built in, giving businesses one foundation to manage their records, run their workflows, and put AI to work.

Our mission is to give businesses greater control over their technology and make it easier for people to create and use software with AI. We've raised a $23 million seed round to help build that future.

What "founding engineering caliber" means here

We use this phrase deliberately, and we mean something specific by it, not a vibe:

• No safety net, no problem.You've shipped production systems where you were the senior-most person in the room, and the outage page had your name on it.


• You choose the fewest moving parts, not the most impressive ones.At this size, boring and fewer failure modes beats clever and fragile every time.


• You've done this before.Early-stage or founding engineering experience, where you built the first version of something (CI/CD, infra-as-code, the AWS account structure, internal development tools and frameworks) that a whole company now depends on.


• You finish.Staff-level here means judgment and follow-through, not a title carried over from a bigger company.

What you'll own

• AWS architecture, security boundaries, and cost: account structure, IAM, networking, and the isolation boundaries between tenants and between environments. Per-tenant cost attribution is a design problem, not something the account boundary hands you.


• CI/CD and developer experience, as a key contributor on a small team rather than a lone owner. The delivery tooling isn't only internal. What we build here ships to customers too.


• The agentic subsystems we're deploying: agent review on every pull request, agent monitoring and deploy triage, retrieval and context injection, evaluation and tracing, with the inference gateway and its budgets underneath. We run each one on ourselves before customers get it.


• The harness those agents run in: sandboxes, credentials, permission boundaries, MCP connections, and integration with the tools engineers use like Cursor and Claude Code. Agent-first means the harness is part of the platform, not a pile of internal scripts.


• Infrastructure-as-code and observability, twice over: our own metrics, logging, and alerting, and the solutions we deploy for customers on top of Postgres, containers, custom domains, email, and cron.


• Security and compliance-adjacent infrastructure supporting our SOC 2 program, in partnership with the CTO. Agents holding write access to production is a real audit surface, and scoping that is part of the job.


• Memory as a product capability. Decisions, invariants, incidents, and the operational record kept as cited context that people and agents both read. We run on it internally and customers get the same thing. That's where AI actually changes the shape of this work, not code generation.

What you bring

• 7.5+ years of professional software engineering experience, minimum.


• Deep, hands-on AWS experience: you've designed and run production AWS infrastructure, not just consumed it.


• Polyglot engineer, we write TypeScript, Python, GoLang (and probably more in the future)


• Founding or early-stage engineering experience: fewer than 20 engineers, high ambiguity, infrastructure decisions with your name on them.


• A daily, practical relationship with AI tooling. You use it to move faster and you have real opinions on where it helps and where it doesn't, in code and in infrastructure.


• Mac-based development environment, comfortable and fast in it.


• Written and verbal communication that works across time zones with no daily stand-up to fall back on.

Nice to have

• Experience standing up SOC 2 or similar compliance infrastructure from scratch.


• Multi-entity or multi-brand technical environments (shared infra, separate accountability).

How we work

Fully remote, async-first by necessity given the time zone spread. Small enough that your decisions ship the same week you make them, and small enough that a bad decision is expensive. We'd rather you say "I don't know yet, give me two days" than guess confidently.

Why join us

Join Socrates to help shape how businesses build, use, and own software and AI. You'll tackle hard problems in making AI reliable, affordable, and secure enough to run the systems businesses depend on. Your decisions will help shape our technology, our products, and everything built on the platform. We value people who take responsibility, move with urgency, and make the work around them better. This is an opportunity to make a lasting contribution to the platform and the company behind it.

Benefits & Perks

We've got you covered with competitive compensation, equity, medical, dental, and vision benefits, plus flexible time off coordinated with your team. Alongside federal holidays, you'll enjoy company-wide summer and winter breaks-dedicated time for everyone to unplug, recharge, and make the most of life outside work.