Founding Platform Eng Lead

Risely AI•San Francisco, CA

19h•Onsite

About The Position

Risely is building the agentic operating system for universities. We're live at some of the largest universities in the country and growing fast. 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.

Requirements

3-8 years of production engineering experience.
Experience building and operating systems at a leadership level.
Proficiency in Python and TypeScript in production.
Experience with Postgres, schema design at scale, and query performance under load.
Experience with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes or equivalent.
Experience with CDK is preferred.
Understanding of cost, latency, blast radius, and failure modes in infrastructure.
Experience with large-scale data pipelines, ETL or ELT, and real-time sync.
Experience with schema evolution.
Experience integrating against third-party source systems (e.g., Salesforce, Workday, Banner, Snowflake).
Experience with multi-tenant patterns: tenant isolation, encryption, RBAC, audit trails.
Experience with LLMs and agents, including building with foundation model APIs, designing evaluation pipelines, and shipping agent products to production.
A working point of view on agent responsibilities and human-in-the-loop requirements.
Demonstrated ability to ship solutions and fix issues.
Hunger and grit; a proactive approach to problem-solving.

Nice To Haves

Systems thinker.
Technically strategic.
Strong abstraction taste.
Good investment judgment.
Master of many threads.
AI-native.

Responsibilities

Own and build the core platform that delivers end-to-end deployments to large universities at record speeds with excellent quality.
Compress deployment time to under 10-12 weeks and continue to reduce it as the customer base grows.
Own the deployment automation, including the pipeline of agents that automate manual engineering tasks for customers.
Design and own the security platform, including compliance, RBAC, encryption, audit trails, and agent guardrails.
Set the strategy for connector and data engineering, and build the framework for new connectors.
Design at the level of the whole platform, seeing dependencies before making changes.
Solve hard business problems with platforms and systems, designing abstractions for scalability.
Make strategic decisions about platform investment versus bespoke code.
Manage several concurrent workstreams effectively and keep the team informed.
Orchestrate AI agents (e.g., Claude Code) to multiply productivity and teach this working method to a growing team.