Staff Platform Engineer: Kubernetes & Distributed Systems

Shield; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to shape Forge, our platform for orchestrating AI workloads across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. You will lead the design and implementation of production-grade Kubernetes-native platform services and reusable orchestration primitives.

You will partner with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, test, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable data-processing, observability, and security patterns while maintaining high developer productivity

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating production distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, backend infrastructure, or data-intensive services.
• Strong software engineering skills and a record of delivering production systems in Go and Python.
• Deep understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including failure handling, idempotency, consistency tradeoffs, retries, ordering, delivery semantics, backpressure, partitioning, state management, and fault tolerance.

Responsibilities

• Build Kubernetes-native platform services: Develop and operate Kubernetes-based services, controllers, operators, deployment patterns, and runtime integrations that support distributed workloads across multiple environments.
• Develop distributed orchestration capabilities: Design and build reusable primitives for authoring, scheduling, and scaling pipeline work.
• Build reliable data-processing infrastructure: Develop platform capabilities for data storage, ingestion, validation, transformation, and governance.
• Develop highly extensible platform components: The Forge Platform base provides standardized tooling around authentication, authorization, observation, networking, routing, secret management, and more to the services that are integrated on top of the ecosystem.
• Create reference architectures: Establish recommended deployment patterns, operating profiles, capacity guidance, benchmarks, reliability practices, and distribution approaches across cloud providers, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments.
• Advance observability and operability: Establish end-to-end metrics, logs, traces, structured events, dashboards, alerting, service-level objectives, operational diagnostics, and runbooks for workflows, pipelines, event streams, and platform services.
• Partner with downstream teams: Work directly with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, test, infrastructure, product, and customer-facing teams to turn recurring distributed-systems problems into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Python

Distributed fundamentals

Workflow orchestration

Event-driven

Architecture design

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical communication

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Envoy

Terraform

Helm

ArgoCD

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to shape Forge, our platform for orchestrating AI workloads across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. You will lead the design and implementation of production-grade Kubernetes-native platform services and reusable orchestration primitives.

You will partner with autonomy, ML Ops, simulation, test, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable data-processing, observability, and security patterns while maintaining high developer productivity