# Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019) at Shield AI

- Company: Shield AI
- What the company does: Autonomy for the world. Backed by a16z.
- Company website: https://shield.ai
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Diego, California
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $160K to $290K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-09-22
- Apply by: 2026-11-06
- Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/c946dfe1-c619-46f1-a7d7-8faaaebe763c
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/shield-ai-staff-engineer-platform-r6019/

## About the role

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will define platform architecture, implement production software, establish reusable operational patterns, and partner with teams across autonomy, ML, simulation, test, infrastructure, and product engineering. Success requires balancing developer productivity, reliability, extensibility, performance, portability, and long-term operational maintainability.

## What they're looking for

- 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
- Experience designing or operating workflow orchestration, distributed job execution, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, or long-running service workflows
- Ability to define architecture and technical standards while remaining hands-on in implementation, production troubleshooting, performance analysis, and reliability improvement
- Experience working across multiple teams to turn recurring infrastructure needs into reusable, well-documented platform capabilities
- Clear technical communication and the ability to make complex distributed-systems architecture understandable to both specialists and downstream users

Tags: Forge