Staff Platform Engineer — Scale, Reliability, Equity

Outsiders Fund; Seattle, Northern (WA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance-based bonus

Equity awards

Medical, dental & vision (fully/75%)

401k plan

Unlimited PTO

Seattle office amenities

Free lunch 3 days/week

AI infrastructure leadership role

Job summary

Gradial is recruiting a Staff Software Engineer, Platform to lead the systems and infrastructure underpinning our AI-native product. You’ll set platform direction, drive critical infrastructure initiatives, and build foundations enabling fast, reliable shipping at scale.

You’ll collaborate closely with the CTO and engineering teams to identify high‑leverage investments, make architecture decisions, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, DevOps or related areas.
• Proven ability to serve as a technical lead for complex platform initiatives while remaining deeply hands‑on in implementation.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud‑native architecture, container orchestration and production infrastructure.
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code, GitOps, CI/CD workflows and modern deployment practices.
• Strong command of observability and reliability fundamentals across metrics, logging, tracing, alerting and incident response.
• Experience designing and operating production infrastructure for rapidly growing products and engineering teams.
• Ability to identify the highest‑leverage platform problems, establish technical direction and drive execution across multiple engineers.
• Strong technical judgment with a track record of making pragmatic architectural decisions around reliability, scalability, performance and cost.
• Ability to lead through influence, create alignment and raise the technical bar without relying on formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction of Gradial’s platform across infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, security, performance and cost.
• Own the reliability, scalability and operational health of our production platform.
• Lead major platform initiatives from problem definition and architecture through hands‑on implementation and production.
• Evolve our Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability and infrastructure as code foundations as the product and engineering organization scale.
• Build tooling, abstractions and automation that make it easier for engineers to develop, deploy and operate production systems.
• Set engineering standards for reliability, service readiness, deployment and operational ownership across the organization.
• Drive improvements in monitoring, alerting, incident response and observability while turning operational learnings into durable platform improvements.
• Partner with engineers across the company to identify infrastructure bottlenecks and scaling risks, then prioritize and lead solutions before they become constraints.
• Provide technical leadership to other engineers through architecture, design reviews, mentorship and hands‑on collaboration.

Skills

Platform engineering

SRE

DevOps

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

CI/CD

Observability

IaC

GitOps

Leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

CI/CD

Job description

Gradial is recruiting a Staff Software Engineer, Platform to lead the systems and infrastructure underpinning our AI-native product. You’ll set platform direction, drive critical infrastructure initiatives, and build foundations enabling fast, reliable shipping at scale.

You’ll collaborate closely with the CTO and engineering teams to identify high‑leverage investments, make architecture decisions, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar across the organization.