Senior AI Platform Engineer

Firestorm

1d•$165,000 - $225,000•Remote

About The Position

At Firestorm, we are building autonomous aerial systems that operate where they are needed most, when they are needed most. Our mission requires speed, ingenuity, and a relentless commitment to engineering excellence. We move fast, test constantly, and deliver capability that performs in the real world, not just in simulation. We are looking for a Senior AI Platform Engineer who is excited to build the platform foundations that make AI-enabled software reliable, secure, and operable at scale. You will design and implement core services, registries, workflow orchestration primitives, and the integration patterns that connect AI-driven workflows to internal systems, without compromising governance, auditability, or safety. This is a hands-on role with significant ownership: you will build the primitives that other engineers depend on, and you will help set the standard for reliability and software quality in a fast-moving environment. If you want to build systems that matter, own your work end to end, and be part of a team that values bold thinking grounded in rigorous engineering, Firestorm is the place to do it.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)
U.S. Citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance
6+ years of experience building and operating backend/platform systems in production
3+ years building platforms that support AI/ML systems in production (e.g., evaluation pipelines, model/app runtime infrastructure, artifact/metadata registries, AI workflow orchestration, MLOps)
Experience operating LLM-enabled systems with production constraints (latency, cost, reliability), including monitoring quality/regressions and enforcing safe tool/data access
Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Java, Python, C++) and modern infrastructure practices
Experience designing APIs, data models, and distributed systems with reliability and security best practices
Experience with workflow/event systems (queues, pub/sub, orchestration, idempotency, state machines) used to run multi-step AI-driven pipelines
Experience implementing observability for AI systems (metrics, tracing, logs) including quality/reliability signals beyond uptime (e.g., eval scores, rejection rates, cost/latency budgets)
Experience with production security controls: RBAC/ABAC, audit logs, secrets management, data access boundaries
Strong communication and documentation skills

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI/ML infrastructure (model serving, inference gateways, feature/data pipelines, experiment tracking, artifact registries)
Experience with GPU-aware infrastructure and/or high-throughput inference (capacity planning, batching, caching, rate limiting)
Experience building evaluation platforms (offline/online evals, canaries, A/B testing, regression automation, dataset/version management)
Familiarity with AI safety/security patterns (prompt injection mitigation, tool sandboxing, policy enforcement, data-loss prevention)
Experience building internal platforms used by multiple teams with clear contracts, SLAs/SLOs, and well-managed migrations
Experience with multi-tenant or role-based access control systems

Responsibilities

Build and operate core backend services that power AI-enabled workflows (APIs, orchestration, storage, and internal integrations)
Design scalable data models and registries for versioned artifacts and metadata, with strong traceability and auditability
Implement secure-by-default service patterns: authN/authZ, audit logs, secrets handling, and least-privilege access
Build reliability foundations: observability, metrics, tracing, alerting, SLOs, incident response playbooks
Implement idempotent APIs and state-handling patterns for resilient workflows (retries, partial failure, reconciliation)
Create integration adapters and event-driven plumbing to safely connect workflows to internal systems
Establish release and deployment practices: CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, rollback strategies, and safe migrations
Partner closely with AI and application engineers to define interfaces, validation layers, and operational constraints
Identify performance, scalability, and security risks early and ship pragmatic solutions quickly

Benefits

We offer comprehensive medical, dental, and visions plans
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan to invest in your long-term retirement goals
Equity grants for new hires
Unlimited PTO
Extremely generous company holiday calendar, including a holiday hiatus in November, & December
Generous Parental Leave
Lifestyle Spending Account
FSA
DCFSA
HSA
Hospital Indemnity insurance
Critical Illness insurance
Accident insurance
Basic Life/AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, 100% covered by Firestorm. Plus, the option to purchase additional life insurance for you and your family.
Mental Health Resources: We provide free mental health resources 24/7 including therapy and more. Additional work-life services, such as free legal and financial support, are available to you as well