Staff Platform Engineer

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to help design and implement internal technology platforms that power engineering, autonomy, and enterprise operations environments.

In this highly technical individual contributor role, you will serve as a senior technical expert responsible for designing and evolving scalable, secure, and highly automated platform infrastructure spanning cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments.

Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Engineering

• Build and evolve scalable internal platform infrastructure supporting engineering workloads across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments.
• Design and implement platform capabilities that enable standardized, secure, and repeatable application deployment of applications and services.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code frameworks and reusable platform modules to accelerate engineering productivity.
• Establish and evolve “paved path” platform patterns that simplify secure software delivery for engineering teams.

Automation & Developer Enablement

• Build automation and developer tooling that improves software delivery and engineering productivity.
• Contribute to and improve CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, and developer platform tooling.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to reduce operational friction and improve system observability, resilience, and reliability.
• Develop internal tools, platform integrations, and automation frameworks that streamline engineering workflows across the organization.

Infrastructure & Systems Engineering

• Design, implement, and operate highly available infrastructure platforms supporting mission-critical engineering systems.
• Implement scalable platform solutions across cloud and on-prem environments including compute, networking, identity, and storage.
• Partner with security teams to embed strong security controls, auditability, and compliance requirements into platform architectures.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies that improve system scalability, security, and operational efficiency.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering roles supporting large-scale systems.
• Deep hands-on experience designing, building and operating cloud or hybrid infrastructure platforms, including networking, identity, compute, and storage systems.
• Strong expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, or similar).
• Experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines, developer platform tooling, and automated deployment workflows.
• Strong systems engineering background across Linux-based environments, distributed systems, and infrastructure automation using scripting or programming languages (Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, etc.).
• Demonstrated ability to understand, build, and own complex platform initiatives and collaborate across engineering and infrastructure teams.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating internal developer platforms (IDP) or engineering productivity platforms that support large-scale development environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes and modern container platforms.
• Experience deploying infrastructure across commercial and government cloud environments, including AWS and Azure.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices and integrating security controls into automated infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience implementing observability platforms, including centralized logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing for large-scale systems.
• Experience working within defense, aerospace, or other regulated industries, including familiarity with frameworks such as NIST or FedRAMP.