Staff Platform Engineer

Hamilton AI•San Francisco, CA

19h

About The Position

This role is infrastructure-first, with a second gear in backend or QA. Hamilton is building the operating system for charter aviation. Quoting, trip planning, live operations, payments, safety-critical data, and sensitive customer information. The software that runs aviation operations doesn't get to be "mostly working." When our systems ship, they need to be correct, observable, and resilient. That's your job. We're hiring a Staff Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure and internal platforms that let Hamilton's engineering team ship fast without breaking things that matter. Your primary skillset is infrastructure: CI/CD, deployment systems, runtime environments, observability, and developer tooling. Your secondary skillset and the thing that makes you dangerous is depth in either backend engineering or quality engineering. You don't need both. You need one, and you need it to be real. Now is a pivotal time in how software gets built. AI-accelerated development is not a buzzword here, it's how we operate. Our engineers ship with AI coding agents, and the platform layer is what makes that safe. You will build the CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, automated verification loops, and deployment guardrails that let a small team move at a speed that shouldn't be possible. The better your platform, the more leverage AI gives us. This is how we compound.

Requirements

Own problems end-to-end and don't wait for a spec
Think in systems and tradeoffs, not tasks
Prize reliability in environments where failure is expensive
Communicate clearly across engineering, product, and leadership
Believe great platform work makes fast shipping possible — not a tax on it
Experience with CI/CD and build systems
Experience with containerized runtimes
Experience with observability and monitoring
Experience with API design
Experience with automation frameworks
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP)
Experience with Node.js/TypeScript
Experience with AI-assisted development workflows

Nice To Haves

Aviation or regulated-domain experience is a bonus.

Responsibilities

Own the platform: Architect and operate Hamilton's CI/CD pipelines, build systems, deployment workflows, and runtime environments.
Build abstractions that standardize how services are built, tested, deployed, and observed.
Own release infrastructure and rollback strategies.
Make AI-accelerated development safe and fast by building automated verification loops, quality signals, and guardrails.
Shape how AI tooling is integrated into the development workflow as core infrastructure.
If background is backend: partner deeply on API design, service architecture, and infrastructure patterns that scale with complexity.
If background is QA: build automation frameworks, testing infrastructure, and release-blocking quality gates that become core platform.
Shape the long-term platform roadmap aligned with enterprise and regulatory requirements in aviation.