Staff, Platform Engineer AI Compute (6034)
- Salary
- USD 200,000 - 300,000 / per-year-salary
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- On-site · San Diego
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 2 November 2026.
About the role
Shield AI's standard text
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 AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
Machine-learning engineers need reliable access to GPUs to train and evaluate models. Shield AI’s AI Factory provides shared compute and development tools for these workflows, both for our engineers and for customer deployments.
We are looking for a Platform Engineer to make that compute platform easier to use, more reliable and more efficient. You will write software, improve how teams share GPUs, help developers troubleshoot workloads and use performance data to guide capacity growth. This is a hands-on software and platform engineering role.
What you'll do:
Build and maintain the software and configuration that let developers run GPU workloads on Kubernetes.
Design quotas, scheduling priorities, permissions and isolation so multiple teams can share compute predictably.
Automate deployment and upgrades of GPU services, including Run:ai, with infrastructure as code and tools such as Terraform and Helm.
Investigate why jobs wait, fail or run slowly, and fix recurring scheduling, configuration, storage and networking problems.
Build diagnostics that connect queue times, GPU utilization, memory requirements and training throughput to the developer’s experience.
Benchmark representative workloads and recommend when to add GPU capacity, how much to add and which hardware fits the workload.
Deliver repeatable installations and upgrades across cloud, on-premises and air-gapped environments.
Key Outcomes:
Developers can get the GPU resources they need through understandable access and resource policies.
Teams can diagnose slow or blocked training jobs and distinguish capacity shortages from configuration problems.
GPU expansion decisions reflect measured demand and workload performance.
Platform changes improve reliability without disrupting existing training workflows.
Required qualifications:
Experience building and supporting production Kubernetes platforms, including GPU or distributed computing workloads.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go or a comparable language.
Experience automating infrastructure deployment, configuration and upgrades.
Practical Linux, networking and storage troubleshooting skills.
Experience with shared resource scheduling, access controls or workload isolation.
Ability to work directly with machine-learning engineers, understand their workloads and turn recurring problems into maintained platform capabilities.
Preferred qualifications:
Experience with Run:ai or comparable GPU scheduling and resource-management systems.
Familiarity with distributed training and tools such as Ray or PyTorch.
Experience delivering on-premises or air-gapped platforms, or contributing to open-source infrastructure.
Why Join Us
The AI Factory is the foundation for how Shield AI develops and deploys autonomy.
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will help build the reference architecture used internally by our engineering teams and delivered to customers building their own AI capabilities. Your work will directly impact how quickly researchers can iterate, how efficiently compute resources are utilized, and how AI systems move from experimentation to operational deployment.
This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of modern AI, distributed systems, Kubernetes, and defense, building a platform that enables the next generation of autonomy systems while leveraging the best of the open-source AI ecosystem.
#LI-DM2
#LF
Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
Shield AI's standard text
###
Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Golang · Helm · PyTorch
Rare in Shield AI's other 299 open postings.
Standard for DevOps / SRE / cloud roles
Kubernetes · Linux · Python · Terraform
Common in DevOps / SRE / cloud postings at any company.
81% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Shield AI's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with Shield AI's other open jobs.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 38 open in Engineering. 19 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in July: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (29 of 38), C++ (22 of 38), Linux (14 of 38), Kubernetes (9 of 38), CI/CD (8 of 38), Golang (8 of 38), PyTorch (7 of 38)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Staff Software Engineer ML Platform (6244) posted Nov 2
- Senior Software Engineer, Frontend Platform (R5790) posted Oct 28
- Staff Engineer, Modelling and Simulation (R6248) posted Oct 17
- Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems (R6245) posted Oct 17
- Manager, Visual Design - Synthetic Reality Development posted Oct 16
- Staff Engineer, Hivemind Reasoning (R6292) posted Oct 15
- Senior Manager, Engineering - Hivemind Reasoning (R6291) posted Oct 15
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy & Motion Planning posted Oct 10
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack - Forge (R6244) posted Oct 10
- Senior Principal Engineer, GNC & State Estimation (R6233) posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Full-Stack – Forge (R6232) posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineer, Full-Stack, Frontend Focus - Forge Applications (R6231) posted Oct 9
- Staff Autonomy Integration Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Engineer, Autonomy Behaviors posted Oct 9
- Senior Engineering Manager posted Oct 9
- Systems Test Engineer posted Oct 9
- Staff Software Engineer, Software Integration & Test posted Oct 9
- Staff Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Oct 8
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Integration (R6035) posted Oct 3
- Perception Engineer - Multimodal & Embodied AI (R6022) posted Oct 3
- Senior C++ Engineer – Foundations (R6023) posted Oct 3
- Senior Staff Engineer, Autonomy Integration Lead (R6159) posted Oct 3
- Senior Safety-Critical Software Engineer (R5788) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Aircraft Trajectory Modeling (R5787) posted Sep 26
- Staff Deep Learning Engineer, State Estimation (R5785) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, State Estimation (R5783) posted Sep 26
- Staff Engineer, Platform (R6019) posted Sep 22
- Autonomy Engineer- Behavior and Motion Planning (R6007) posted Sep 16
- Autonomy & Perception Software Engineer (R5911) posted Sep 9
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted Aug 31
- Staff Engineer, Data Platform (R5659) posted Aug 26
- Discrete Planning Engineer (R5440) posted Jul 24
- Staff Engineer, Core Platform Integration (R5411) posted Jul 23
- Senior Staff Engineer, Software Autonomy (R5125) posted Jun 4
- Senior Staff Engineer, ML Ops (R4941) posted May 14
- Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Sep 30
- Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy Applications Engineering posted Jul 8
From the team and dates on Shield AI's own job board.
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