Senior Engineer - Platform

Straia•San Francisco, CA

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Straia, we’re building the AI-native intelligence layer for colleges and universities. Today, colleges run on dozens of disconnected systems, forcing staff to spend hundreds of hours manually reconciling data, compiling reports, and tracking down insights. Straia changes that. We unify institutional data and layer on AI agents that answer questions, generate insights/visualizations, and automate repetitive workflows, transforming how colleges operate. Over time, Straia will evolve into the core intelligence layer for institutional operations, where every function, from student advising to admissions to budgeting and resource planning, is supported by collaborative AI agents that understand each institution’s unique data landscape. We recently raised our pre-seed from a16z, Reach Capital, and JFF Ventures, and are now hiring a Senior Engineer - Platform to help build the technical backbone of how institutions interact with their data. As a Senior Engineer, you'll work closely with our CTO and the broader engineering team to build and scale the infrastructure that powers AI-driven analytics for higher education. This is a 0 → 1 opportunity to own the platform layer of a product that moves institutional data at scale, runs privately hosted frontier models, and delivers low-latency query responses to non-technical users making real decisions about student outcomes. You'll also play a key role in building the internal tooling and automations that make our small team operate like one ten times its size. We believe platform engineering isn't just about keeping systems running — it's about building the leverage that lets every engineer ship faster, debug faster, and focus on problems that matter. We're looking for someone who raises the bar by default. The kind of engineer whose judgment and speed increase the velocity of everyone around them — and who takes genuine ownership over the decisions that shape how the platform evolves. If you thrive when expectations are high and the pace is fast, you'll feel right at home 🙂

Requirements

Strong platform or backend infrastructure background — 6+ years building and operating production backend systems, with a focus on the layer between application code and infrastructure: data pipelines, service reliability, internal platforms.
Experienced moving data at scale — You've worked with columnar or analytical databases, large-scale ETL or streaming pipelines, or high-throughput query engines. You know the tradeoffs between systems like DuckDB, BigQuery, and Postgres at a practical level.
Comfortable with ML integration — You don't need to be an ML engineer, but you've integrated models into production systems before. You understand model serving, how to wrap inference in a reliable API, and what makes latency a hard problem at scale.
Cloud-fluent — Solid hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP preferred). Comfortable with IaC tooling like Pulumi or Terraform and owning CI/CD pipelines end-to-end.
A natural leader — You've led large platform initiatives before, not just contributed to them. You're comfortable being the person who drives something from blank page to production and defends the decisions along the way.
Technically decisive — You make good calls under ambiguity, communicate your reasoning clearly, and know when to move fast versus when to slow down and align the team. You bring expertise and a clear point of view to hard decisions, but you build consensus on the ones that matter.
Mission-driven — Excited about using technology to help universities make smarter, faster, more equitable decisions for their students.

Responsibilities

Own the Data Movement Layer — Design and scale the pipelines that ingest, transform, and serve petabytes of compressed institutional data. You'll make DuckDB, Postgres, and GCS work together so that complex analytical queries feel instantaneous to the people running them.
Integrate ML Models into the Platform — Own the backend work that makes AI a first-class citizen in our stack. That means API design, model serving infrastructure, request routing, and ensuring inference latency doesn't become a ceiling on product quality.
Lead Key Platform Initiatives End-to-End — You won't just contribute to platform work — you'll own significant chunks of it. From scoping and architecture through to delivery and iteration, you'll be the person driving some of our most critical technical bets.
Make Decisions That Stick — As an early senior voice on the team, your architectural and technical decisions will shape the platform for years. You'll be expected to think beyond the immediate problem, weigh long-term tradeoffs, and advocate clearly for the right path — even when it's the harder one.
Mentor and Elevate the Team — You lead by example and bring others along with you. You give direct, useful feedback, take time to help engineers work through hard problems, and care as much about the team's growth as your own.
Champion Observability and Resilience — You treat visibility and fault tolerance as first-class engineering concerns, not nice-to-haves. You naturally build systems that are easy to understand, debug, and recover.