Sr Staff Platform Engineer / Team Lead

Inari•West Lafayette, IN

7d•$169,800 - $233,400•Hybrid

About The Position

Inari is transforming agriculture through predictive design and AI, and the platform powering that mission is crucial. This role is for a platform architect who will be a key technical leader and force multiplier on the Data, AI, and Engineering team. The ideal candidate enjoys architecture design, solving integration challenges, creating well-designed APIs, and troubleshooting production issues. This role will drive platform architecture to build and scale the technical foundation for internal applications, tools, data workflows, and AI systems that scientists and engineers use daily to advance the predictive design engine and product pipelines. The position requires a hands-on approach to understand system workings, senior-level strategic thinking, and strong collaboration skills to bring teams together. This role can be located in Cambridge, MA or West Lafayette, IN.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, systems engineering, data engineering, or related technical roles.
2+ years of experience in technical leadership or leading engineering projects.
Strong hands-on experience designing and building platform or systems architecture, especially in data, AI, or scientific computing environments.
Proficiency in Python and practical experience with AWS, Kubernetes, serverless architecture, and container-based infrastructure.
Experience building and integrating complex systems such as APIs, orchestration frameworks, data pipelines, workflow platforms, internal tools, or AI/ML infrastructure.
Ability to influence technical direction beyond your immediate team.
Clear communication skills, with the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for engineering, product, science, and leadership audiences.
A bias toward building practical, reusable, scalable systems that teams can actually use and operate.

Nice To Haves

Experience with MCPs or similar AI agent integration frameworks.
Familiarity with Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, EKS, Quilt, MLflow, or related data and AI platform tooling.
Experience building internal developer platforms, shared engineering services, or platform capabilities for multiple teams.
Background in life sciences, agriculture, AgTech, biotech, or another domain where data and AI are central to scientific work.
Experience supporting production-grade AI, ML, RAG, agentic, or model-serving systems.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture and development of key software systems, platform components, pipelines, and services within Inari's Data & AI Platform.
Build and mature core platform foundations, including authentication and authorization patterns, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and reusable deployment frameworks.
Enable teams to host internal applications, run workflows, expose APIs, use shared services, and build on a stronger engineering platform.
Build and support infrastructure for modern AI-enabled systems, including agentic workflows, MCPs, model-adjacent services, and internal AI platform capabilities.
Drive tighter integration across software engineering, data engineering, AI/ML, and scientific computing platforms, shaping a cohesive architecture across AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, Quilt/S3, Python, and related services.
Serve as a senior technical voice across engineering, helping drive architecture decisions, technical standards, platform strategy, and platform-first thinking.
Partner closely with the Director of AI & Data Engineering to set technical direction, identify platform priorities, and represent engineering platform needs in leadership discussions.
Act as the technical lead for a small, high-impact team of engineers, setting technical direction, reviewing designs and code, and raising the bar on engineering practice.