Shield AI
Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019)
$160K–$290K
San Diego, California +1 · On-site · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 22, 2026
- Location
- San Diego, California
San Mateo, California - Experience
- Significant experience required; no number of years stated.
About the job
Leads architecture and hands-on development of Forge’s Kubernetes-native platform for orchestrating distributed workloads and data workflows across cloud, on-premises, edge, sovereign, and air-gapped environments.
What you'll do
- Build and operate Kubernetes-native services and distributed workload orchestration capabilities.
- Develop data-processing infrastructure and establish reusable deployment, reliability, and observability practices across environments.
- Partner with engineering teams to turn recurring distributed-systems needs into reusable platform capabilities.
What they ask 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.
- Deep understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals and experience with workflow orchestration, distributed job execution, asynchronous processing, event-driven systems, or long-running service workflows.
- Ability to define architecture and standards while remaining hands-on in implementation, troubleshooting, performance analysis, and reliability improvement.
Nice to have
- Experience with Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, admission control, scheduling extensions, KubeRay, or workload-management systems.
- Experience with distributed workflow technologies, messaging and event streaming, observability, networking, or infrastructure-as-code tools.
Pay
USD 160,000–290,000 per-year-salary; base salary
Tools
Kubernetes, Go, Python, KubeRay, Ray, Temporal, Argo Workflows, Flyte
AI focus
Builds the platform infrastructure powering Forge, the AI Factory, and workflows for building an AI Pilot; supports autonomy development, simulation, training, evaluation, and deployment.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative