[Hiring] Staff Platform Engineer @Gravie

Role Description

Gravie is seeking a hands-on Staff Platform Engineer to do three things at once: build the golden roads and paved paths our engineering teams build on, define the north star architecture the organization moves toward, and design and deliver our AI-enabled capabilities. This is the hub role for technical direction at Gravie: long-term architectural direction and the standards that carry it converge here and radiate outward across teams.

The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems and AWS experience with real production generative AI experience, and is equally credible building a paved path teams voluntarily adopt and setting a target-state architecture the whole organization will inherit. They will partner across Engineering, Product, Data, Security, and Infrastructure, and will work most closely with our Platform Engineering team.

At Gravie, engineers work closely with Product and own outcomes end to end, practicing agentic development to increase the scope and leverage of that ownership.

• 40% golden roads and paved paths
• 30% north star architecture
• 30% AI solutions

This role is planned and reviewed on this split, not funded out of leftover capacity.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the paved paths teams build on, including reference implementations, shared libraries, service templates, scaffolding, and pipeline templates.
• Treat the paved road as a product with real users: measure adoption and time to first success, and fix the parts people route around.
• Do the first real implementation yourself, on a real workload with a real team.
• Build the distributed systems patterns the paths encode: backend services, event-driven workers, job pipelines, APIs, and relational data models.
• Partner with the Platform Engineering team as the primary delivery vehicle.
• Own migration and adoption, including moving existing services onto the path.
• Stay in code review across teams and close to production incidents.
• Define and publish the target-state architecture.
• Own the AWS foundations product and AI workloads depend on.
• Drive standards adoption to completion.
• Lead buy, build, and reuse decisions.
• Reduce surface area as deliberately as you add it.
• Design and build production-grade AI agent systems.
• Design retrieval, context, and memory systems that ground AI outputs.
• Develop AI-powered decision-support systems.
• Build product-quality user experiences using React and TypeScript.
• Establish patterns for AI quality assurance.
• Establish one standard way to build, run, evaluate, and operate AI systems.
• Act as the connective point across teams.
• Drive cross-team communication.
• Build alignment where incentives differ across teams.
• Contribute to roadmap and capacity planning.
• Work through the Platform Engineering team to effect change at organization scale.
• Facilitate collaboration between engineering teams, Product, Data, Security, and Infrastructure.
• Represent technical direction to leadership.
• Partner with Product to shape the roadmap.
• Raise the engineering bar through design review, mentorship, and a working decision-record practice.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and Data on AI governance.

Qualifications

• Eight or more years of software engineering experience.
• Still shipping: writes and reviews code today.
• Experience building internal platform capability.
• Hands-on experience building and operating production AI applications.
• Deep AWS expertise across a multi-account organization.
• A track record of establishing architectural foundations.
• Hands-on experience with agentic software development.
• Deep expertise in at least one primary area (Python or JVM backend and distributed systems, or React and TypeScript product engineering).
• Experience with retrieval, embeddings, context, memory, evaluation, monitoring, or AI agent architectures.
• Strong judgment in testing, monitoring, failure handling, privacy, security, access control, and data governance.
• Experience working with or inside a platform or infrastructure team.
• Experience serving as a central technical point across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to create alignment across disagreeing teams.
• Clear written communication and effective collaboration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Healthcare, health insurance, or benefits administration experience.
• Previous experience in a venture-backed high growth company.
• Internal developer platform or developer experience work.
• Experience with GitLab CI at scale.
• Production observability and LLM observability practice.
• Event-driven and streaming architecture experience.
• Practical experience with agent tooling and standards.
• Experience defining an AI governance or technology radar process.

Benefits

• Alternative medicine coverage.
• Flexible PTO.
• Up to 16 weeks paid parental leave.
• Paid holidays.
• 401k program.
• Transportation perks.
• Education reimbursement.
• 2 days of paid paw-ternity leave.