Staff Platform Engineer - Kubernetes & Distributed Systems

Shield AI; Northern, San Diego (KY, CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to lead the Forge Platform Engineering team, building Kubernetes-native services that orchestrate distributed workloads across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. You will define platform architecture, implement production software, and establish reusable operational patterns to support autonomy, ML, simulation, test, and product teams.

You will partner with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, infrastructure, and customer-facing groups to turn

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating production distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, backend infrastructure, or data-intensive services.
• Strong software engineering skills in Go and Python with production experience.
• Deep understanding of distributed-systems concepts: failure handling, retries, ordering, state management, and fault tolerance.
• Experience designing or operating workflow orchestration and long-running service workflows.
• Ability to define architecture and standards while staying hands-on in implementation and troubleshooting.
• Experience collaborating across multiple teams to create reusable platform capabilities.
• Clear technical communication for both specialists and downstream users.

Responsibilities

• Build Kubernetes-native platform services and controllers for distributed workloads across environments.
• Develop reusable primitives for authoring, scheduling, and scaling pipelines.
• Create data-processing infrastructure for storage, ingestion, validation, transformation, and governance.
• Develop extensible platform components including auth, observability, networking, and secret management.
• Establish reference deployment patterns, capacity guidance, benchmarks, and reliability practices.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Go

Python

Cloud-native platforms

Production troubleshooting

Team leadership

Kubernetes

Observability

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

ArgoCD

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to lead the Forge Platform Engineering team, building Kubernetes-native services that orchestrate distributed workloads across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. You will define platform architecture, implement production software, and establish reusable operational patterns to support autonomy, ML, simulation, test, and product teams.

You will partner with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, infrastructure, and customer-facing groups to turn