Principal Platform Engineer, AI & Infrastructure

True Anomaly•Washington, DC

5d•$255,000 - $375,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At True Anomaly, we’re building the next generation of space defense. The way we build, deliver, and scale is itself a source of advantage, and the AI and infrastructure that everything else runs on is one of the most important force multipliers in the company. We are investing in platform engineering as a core operating capability, not a side experiment, and this role exists to set the technical direction that makes that investment pay off. As the Principal Platform Engineer, AI & Infrastructure, you will be the most senior individual contributor and the most trusted AI technologist on the platform engineering team. This is not a research role. It is a role about direction and leverage. You will steer how True Anomaly builds and operates with AI, help set the vision for how the company uses AI to deliver space superiority, and bring the enterprise to the cutting edge of agentic engineering. And while AI and infrastructure are your center of gravity, you will be a technical leader across the whole of platform engineering, helping shape decisions on developer experience, CI/CD, DevOps, and compute infrastructure the same way you shape AI platform decisions, and supporting every team in the org, including data. The scope is broad by design. Your work will range from shaping the technical roadmap for the platform engineering org, to guiding the high-level architecture and design of the platforms and infrastructure that will enable these capabilities for the company, to advising teams across the business on how to put AI to work. You will ultimately support every team in platform, including infrastructure, AI, and data, helping set technical direction on AI providers and architectures, on DevOps and CI/CD best practices, on developer experience, and on the compute and infrastructure decisions the platform depends on. You will do this in concert with the Staff engineers and teams who own and build these systems, and you will set the standards that the rest of the platform team builds against. Beyond strategy and high-level architecture, you will be the person we deploy against the hardest, least-defined technical problems in the company, where the business need is critical and the path to a solution is wide open. These problems call for a new system to manage something central to how we operate. You will parachute in, frame the problem, and design and deliver the platform that solves it. The platform engineering org, reporting to the Chief Security Officer, works across the enterprise, from engineering and product to marketing and finance. You will report to the Chief Security Officer or the VP of Platform Engineering, with direct visibility to executive leadership and the opportunity to shape how a fast-growing defense technology company operates with AI and infrastructure. As the technical anchor for the team, you’ll bring a breadth of cross-discipline experience across AI platforms, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, systems design, and technical decision-making. You will partner with senior leaders across the organization, exercise cross-organizational influence to align teams on a shared technical direction, and work through significant ambiguity to establish technical requirements and deliver results. You will set the technical bar for how AI and infrastructure are built at True Anomaly, and coach and mentor the engineers around you to meet it.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering, DevOps, SRE, or cloud engineering experience, with a track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams or domains, owning roadmaps, and making architectural decisions that others build on.
Deep expertise in AI platforms and agentic engineering, paired with strong, hands-on command of cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, developer experience, and compute, sufficient to set direction and course-correct across the platform.
A track record of taking ambiguous, high-stakes problems from zero to a delivered system, including framing the problem when the requirements and implementation are undefined.
Strong general software background, with real experience building, deploying, and operating production systems on cloud. You understand a professional software development lifecycle end to end, and you understand what constitutes maintainable code.
Hands-on experience with large language model APIs, including prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent frameworks (e.g. CrewAI, Pydantic AI), and a point of view on where agentic engineering is headed.
Strong experience with the foundations modern engineering teams rely on: infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD and deployment standards, developer platforms and shared tooling, and the cloud networking and identity underneath them.
Experience deploying and operating production workloads across cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), including the networking, identity, and CI/CD foundations they depend on.
Experience using AI-powered development tools to deliver production code and automate routine work, and the ability to leverage AI as a force multiplier for yourself and the teams around you.
Demonstrated ability to work across a broad technical surface area, context-switching between AI platforms, infrastructure, application development, and platform architecture, and to work across teams to understand requirements and seek consensus.
Strong communication skills and the ability to translate technical AI concepts for non-technical audiences, and to influence executive leadership on technical direction.
Self-directed and comfortable operating with high autonomy in a fast-paced environment where priorities shift and the playbook is being written in real time.
US Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a Top-Secret security clearance.

Nice To Haves

Experience with data platforms, pipelines, or big-data infrastructure, and the ability to help set technical direction for the data team.
Experience deploying AI or ML systems in government, defense, or regulated environments with security and compliance constraints.
Familiarity with government cloud environments (AWS GovCloud, Azure Government) and authorization frameworks (FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, IL4/IL5).
General experience with various AI technologies, like model harnesses, agentic coding tools, skills, MCPs, RAG, embedding pipelines, etc.
Experience with LLM eval frameworks, OpenTelemetry tracing, and other model measurement and observability frameworks.
Experience with containers and orchestration, service mesh, and artifact/registry management.
Experience building knowledge retrieval systems, embedding pipelines, or enterprise search infrastructure.
Background in developer tooling, platform engineering, or internal platform teams at high-growth technology companies.
Active U.S. Secret or Top-Secret security clearance.

Responsibilities

Help shape and set the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for how True Anomaly builds and operates with AI and the platforms and infrastructure that enable these capabilities, partnering with leadership and the infrastructure team to steer the direction of the company’s systems in service of space superiority.
Parachute into the hardest, most ambiguous technical problems across the enterprise, where the business need is critical but the implementation is undefined, and get hands-on designing and delivering the platforms and systems that solve them.
Set high-level system design and architecture direction across the platform, spanning AI, infrastructure, and data, and bring the enterprise to the cutting edge of agentic engineering. You will do this in concert with the teams and Staff engineers who own these systems, reviewing architecture, helping course-correct, and raising the technical bar rather than designing in isolation.
Play a leading role in DevOps, CI/CD, developer experience, and compute infrastructure decisions and best practices, just as you do in AI, helping the infrastructure and data teams establish paved-road patterns that scale across the enterprise.
Guide technical evaluation and selection of AI providers, platforms, and tooling, helping the team make build-vs-buy decisions based on capability, compliance requirements, and speed to value.
Set the standards and paved-road patterns that the platform engineering team builds against, and help drive their adoption across teams.
Serve as the company’s most trusted AI technologist: advise engineering, product, and business functions on how to apply AI, and help set the vision for how AI is used across the enterprise.
Partner with engineering, security, and IT teams to ensure AI and infrastructure deployments meet government security and compliance requirements across data classification levels.
Act as the technical anchor and mentor for the engineers on the team, setting a high engineering bar and multiplying the people around you.
Stay current with the rapidly evolving AI landscape and bring informed recommendations on new models, tools, and capabilities that could accelerate the company.