Senior Engineer, Platform Infrastructure (R5516)

Shield AI•Washington, DC

4d•$120,000 - $180,000

About The Position

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AIâ€™s technology actively supports operations worldwide. The platform isn't a product that's ever "finished." It's something we improve continuously. Every deployment, outage, bug, and annoying manual task is an opportunity to make the system better. An L3 Platform Engineer is a fully contributing member of that effort. This isn't a ticket factory. We expect engineers to think critically, collaborate closely, and continuously improve both the platform and the way we build it.

Requirements

Software is never finished.
Your goal isn't simply to make today's feature work.
Your goal is to leave the code, infrastructure, and deployment process easier to change tomorrow.
If humans perform the same task repeatedly, the system probably needs improvement.
Manual processes are temporary.
Automation is the destination.
Large changes hide mistakes.
Small changes expose them.
We value engineers who can decompose large problems into safe, incremental improvements.
Platform engineering is a collaborative discipline.
You bring potential solutions to the team, clearly explain your reasoning and tradeoffs, and help the team build a shared understanding of the code or design not merely produce it.
You are responsible for understanding, validating, and clearly communicating the work you contribute.
When something goes wrong, we don't stop at fixing it.
We ask: Why did this happen? Why wasn't it detected sooner? How do we make this impossible or at least unlikely next time?
Incidents should improve the platform.
Kubernetes
Linux
Networking fundamentals
Git and trunk-based development
GitLab CI
Infrastructure as Code
Ansible
Terraform
Helm
Zarf
Containers
PKI and certificate management
Secrets management
Observability
Infrastructure testing
Troubleshooting distributed systems
Learn quickly and become productive in unfamiliar systems.

Responsibilities

Build and improve the platform that deploys and operates customer environments.
Develop infrastructure as code using Ansible, Terraform, Helm, Zarf, Big Bang, Packer, and related tooling.
Improve Kubernetes platforms and the systems around them.
Build deployment automation that reduces risk and removes manual work.
Pair with other engineers to design, implement, and troubleshoot platform capabilities.
Write automated tests for infrastructure and deployment workflows.
Improve observability, reliability, security, and recoverability.
Write documentation that explains why something exists—not just how to type commands.
Leave every part of the system better than you found it.