Staff Platform Engineer (R6156)

San Diego · USD 142,000-213,000 / year · 8+ years experience · Onsite · Posted Oct 2, 2026

At a glance

The Staff Platform Engineer will design and implement internal technology platforms to support engineering, autonomy, and enterprise operations.
This senior individual contributor role focuses on evolving scalable, secure, and automated infrastructure across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments.
The position involves building paved paths for developers and implementing automation to enhance reliability, security, and productivity.

Build and evolve scalable internal platform infrastructure across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments.
Design and implement platform capabilities for standardized, secure, and repeatable application deployment.
Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code frameworks and reusable platform modules.
Establish and evolve paved path platform patterns to simplify secure software delivery.
Build automation and developer tooling to improve 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.
Design, implement, and operate highly available infrastructure platforms supporting mission-critical systems.
Implement scalable platform solutions including compute, networking, identity, and storage.
Partner with security teams to embed security controls, auditability, and compliance into platform architectures.

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.
Deep hands-on experience designing, building, and operating cloud or hybrid infrastructure platforms.
Strong expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks like Terraform or Ansible.
Experience building or improving CI/CD pipelines, developer platform tooling, and automated deployment workflows.
Strong systems engineering background across Linux-based environments and distributed systems.
Proficiency in scripting or programming languages such as Python, Go, Bash, or PowerShell.
Demonstrated ability to own complex platform initiatives and collaborate across engineering teams.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence technical direction.

Experience building or operating internal developer platforms (IDP) or engineering productivity platforms.
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.
Experience implementing observability platforms, including centralized logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing.
Experience working within defense, aerospace, or other regulated industries.
Familiarity with frameworks such as NIST or FedRAMP.

Position may be based in San Diego, CA; Dallas, TX; Washington, D.C.; or other Shield AI locations.