# Founding Platform Eng Lead at Risely AI

- Company: Risely AI
- What the company does: The University OS: every student, course, dollar, and donor on one record, Risely's agents drafting in every office, and staff approving every move. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://www.risely.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Work setup: On-site
- Posted: 2026-05-11
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.gem.com/risely-ai/am9icG9zdDqsxYI9qfvOEU9xcwdNGIZ0
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/risely-ai-founding-platform-eng-lead/

## About the role

We're hiring our Founding Platform Lead. This is a player-coach role at the foundation of the company. You'll own and build the core platform that delivers end-to-end deployments to large universities at record speeds with excellent quality. 3-8 years of production engineering. You've built and operated systems at the level of the things we're hiring you to lead:

## What they're looking for

- Systems thinker. You design at the level of the whole platform. You see dependencies before you change anything
- Abstraction taste. You know which patterns deserve to become primitives. You know when to invest in the platform layer and when to leave a customer feature as bespoke code
- Investment judgment. You know when to stop adding surface area and reinforce the platform underneath. You've made that call and you've been right
- Master of many threads. You run several concurrent workstreams without dropping the ball on any of them and you’re able to keep the team posted on all threads at any time
- Backend. Python and TypeScript in production. Postgres, schema design at scale, query performance under real load
- Infrastructure. AWS or GCP, Kubernetes or equivalent, CDK preferred. You understand how to make the calls on cost, latency, blast radius, and failure modes