AI Platform Engineer

Job Overview

You will join Starburst, a company that provides enterprise intelligence at scale, and work as an AI Platform Engineer. This role involves building shared development primitives that enable multiple product teams to work faster.

Responsibilities

• Design and build an agent development SDK that abstracts common patterns such as tool registration, context management, evaluation hooks, and prompt management.
• Create a language bridge between Python and JVM with type safety, error propagation, and observability.
• Develop developer tooling, including local development environments, debugging tools, test harnesses, and CI integration.
• Define and maintain API contracts between the AI layer and the Starburst platform.
• Build shared infrastructure, including model gateways, observability pipelines, and experiment frameworks.
• Develop unified, product-agnostic components used across multiple products.
• Own platform health beyond feature delivery, focusing on performance, reliability, and developer ergonomics.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building platform, infrastructure, or developer tooling.
• Proficiency in both Python and JVM languages (Java or Kotlin).
• Experience designing APIs and SDKs consumed by other engineering teams.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: RPC, serialization, error handling, observability.
• Experience with containerization, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).
• Track record of building tools that measurably improve other engineers' velocity.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LLM integration patterns: model APIs, token management, streaming, tool use.
• Experience with cross-language interop (gRPC, FFI, language bridges).
• Open-source contributions to developer tooling or infrastructure projects.
• Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks and experiment infrastructure.
• Experience supporting both research and production workloads on the same platform.
• Java agent framework experience (LangChain4j).

Travel Requirements

This role requires 25% in-person travel for purposes including new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events.