Staff Platform Engineer - Developer Infrastructure

Persona AI; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus potential

Medical benefits (100%/99% covered)

Equity

PTO

Winter break

Job summary

Persona AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer for Developer Infrastructure in Houston, TX. You will own and scale the CI/CD and developer platform supporting a multi-language robotics software stack, including C/C++, Python, and Rust components.

The role involves on-prem and edge deployments, cross-compilation, and secure, signed delivery to robot fleets. You will automate, optimize build times, and enable engineers to ship faster, while maintaining reproducibility and strong observability

Qualifications

• 8+ years operating production infrastructure for a software engineering org with direct ownership of CI/CD or developer platform work.
• Deep Linux systems fluency including networking, storage, systemd, kernel and driver debugging.
• Hands-on ownership of a major CI system (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Buildkite, Jenkins) and understanding of the build and cache layers underneath it.
• Real experience with a C/C++ build system at scale (e.g., Bazel, CMake) including cross-compilation and dependency pinning.
• Infrastructure as code (Ansible, Terraform) and a GitOps mindset: reviewable, reproducible, version-controlled changes.
• Fluent Python and Bash; you automate rather than document.
• Strong written communication; you leave behind decisions that outlast the conversation.

Responsibilities

• Own and scale the CI/CD and developer platform used by the software engineers.
• Manage reproducible dev environments across laptops, labs, and robots.
• Oversee cloud and on-prem infrastructure for multi-TB robot logs and training clusters.
• Implement secure, signed, provenance-aware deployment pipelines for robot software.

Skills

CI/CD ownership

Linux systems fluency

CI system ownership

C/C++ build systems

Bazel/CMake

IaC/GitOps

Python

Bash

Written communication

Tools

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Buildkite

Jenkins

Job description

Job Title: Staff Platform Engineer - Developer Infrastructure

Department: Software

Employment Type: Full-Time

Location: Houston, TX

Travel: 10%

Who We Are

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material-handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

Why Join Persona AI?

• We offer competitive compensation, a performance-based bonus, 99% employer covered medical benefits, early-stage equity, competitive PTO, and a company-wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.
• You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.
• Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

About The Role

Our robots are built by a small team that ships fast and deploys onto hardware in customer facilities. Between a laptop and a running humanoid there are: a C++/Python/Rust monorepo, an ARM64 cross-compile matrix, kernel modules and a real-time patch set, container images that have to land on Jetson devices, and a rollout process that cannot brick a robot several timezones away.

Today that path is held together by the engineers who also write control code. Your job is to own it so they don't have to. Success is measured in build times, time-to-first-commit for a new engineer, deployment frequency, and the number of infrastructure problems the rest of the team stops thinking about.

This is not a cloud-only role. Roughly half the surface area is physical: lab networks, robot dev boxes, bench and HIL fixtures, on-site LAN infrastructure, and the mirrors that let a deployment site work with no internet at all.

What You Will Be Doing

Build and CI

• The build graph for a mixed C++/Python/Rust/CUDA monorepo: involving incremental correctness, remote caching, and cross-compilation for AMD64 dev boxes and ARM64 targets.
• Our CI capacity: self-hosted runners, GPU and hardware-attached runners, and the queue discipline that keeps PR feedback under ten minutes.
• Reproducibility: A build from a tagged commit six months from now should produce a bit-identical artifact.

Release and fleet delivery

• Versioning, artifact promotion, and the container registry / package mirrors that back it.
• Safe, resumable, bandwidth-aware rollout to robots - staged channels, canary robots, and rollback that works over a bad link.
• Signing and provenance for anything that lands on a robot.

Developer platform

• Reproducible dev environments across laptops, shared dev machines, and robots.
• Self-service tooling so an autonomy engineer can get a branch onto a robot without filing a ticket or learning Kubernetes.
• Onboarding path: a new engineer builds, tests in sim, and deploys to a bench robot on day one.

Infrastructure and observability

• Cloud and on-prem compute, storage for multi-TB robot logs, and the training/simulation cluster's operational layer.
• Fleet observability: metrics, logs, and traces from robot to dashboard.
• Site infrastructure for deployments: VPN/overlay networking, local mirrors, offline-capable registry authorization.

What We Are Looking For

• 8+ years operating production infrastructure for a software engineering org, with direct ownership of CI/CD or developer platform work.
• Deep Linux systems fluency including networking, storage, systemd, kernel and driver debugging.
• Hands-on ownership of a major CI system (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Buildkite, Jenkins) and an understanding of the build and cache layers underneath it.
• Real experience with a C/C++ build system at scale e.g., Bazel, CMake, or equivalent. Should include cross-compilation and dependency pinning.
• Infrastructure as code (Ansible, Terraform) and a GitOps mindset: reviewable, reproducible, version-controlled change.
• Fluent Python and Bash. You automate rather than document a manual procedure.
• Strong written communication. You leave behind decisions that outlast the conversation.

Bonus Skills

• Shipping software to embedded or edge Linux targets - ARM64, Jetson, Yocto/custom images, A/B partitions, OTA update systems.
• Hybrid on-prem plus cloud, and clear judgment about which belongs where.
• Open-source observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and self-hosted services (registries, artifact stores, object storage).
• Robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or another hardware-heavy environment where a bad release has physical consequences.
• Nix, Bazel remote execution, or other tools for reproducible builds at scale.

Persona AI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.