Senior Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering

We're looking for a Senior Staff Engineer to own the API platform and backend infrastructure that underpins Albert OS as it evolves toward a full PaaS offering. This isn't a greenfield role — we're mid-transition, and the job is to lead the architecture, set the patterns, and bring the platform across without compromising reliability.

You'll own how the platform performs and scales across a multi-tenant environment operating at sub-second latency SLOs. You'll be a trusted technical partner to platform engineering, product engineering, and security teams. We're also moving toward AI-native, spec-driven development — and we want this person to lead from the front on that shift.

Cloud architecture and platform strategy

• →Own the roadmap for our Node.js API platform, ensuring it scales, stays secure, and stays easy for teams to build on.
• →Design and maintain access control systems, authorization patterns, and ACL frameworks that work consistently across services.
• →Define and enforce service-to-service interaction patterns, including authentication, trust boundaries, and inter-service contracts.
• →Build and maintain shared backend libraries, frameworks, and abstractions that improve consistency and velocity across product engineering teams.
• →Design and evolve event-driven architecture patterns — including async messaging, event sourcing, and queue-based workflows — across the platform.
• →Partner with product and engineering to establish platform primitives that teams can build on reliably.

Performance and reliability

• →Own performance and reliability for a multi-tenant platform operating at sub-second latency SLOs.
• →Identify and resolve bottlenecks across the request path — from API gateway through to data layer.
• →Define reliability standards, runbooks, and incident response patterns for platform-level failures.
• →Instrument the platform for observability: traces, metrics, and alerts that surface problems before partners do.

Developer experience and DevOps

• →Build and maintain tooling, automation, and CI/CD pipelines that improve reliability and shipping velocity.
• →Establish best practices for infrastructure as code, containerization, observability, and cost optimization.
• →Embed security, compliance, and reliability standards into the development lifecycle by default.

Technical leadership

• →Lead the architecture through a platform transition — setting direction, establishing patterns, and holding the bar on reliability throughout.
• →Serve as a senior technical authority across the API platform, backend architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
• →Own and evolve engineering guidelines across the org — coding standards, architectural patterns, review processes, and AI tooling norms.
• →Champion AI-native and spec-driven development practices, setting the standard for how engineers work with AI tooling day-to-day.
• →Align long-term technical direction with business objectives in partnership with Product, TPM, and Security leadership.

People leadership:

• →Manage and mentor a small team of 3–4 platform engineers, providing technical guidance, career development, and day-to-day support.
• →Set clear expectations, run structured reviews, and build a team culture of ownership and craft.
• →Partner with engineering leadership on hiring, onboarding, and growing platform engineering talent.

Required:

• 12+ years in backend platform or cloud engineering roles.
• Deep expertise in NestJS and Node.js-based backend architectures at scale.
• Deep AWS expertise and strong understanding of distributed systems: microservices, containers, event-driven architectures.
• Strong experience designing access control systems, authorization frameworks, and IAM
• Hands-on experience building shared libraries and platform abstractions consumed by multiple product teams.
• Demonstrated track record of owning performance and reliability in multi-tenant SaaS environments with strict latency SLOs.
• Expertise with IaC (Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong networking, security, observability, and performance engineering fundamentals.
• Clear communication and the ability to influence across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred:

• Exposure to Azure, GCP, or other cloud environments.
• Experience in SaaS or PaaS at enterprise scale.
• Background in product engineering with a track record of shaping technical direction.
• Strong familiarity with AI-native development workflows and spec-driven development practices.
• Knowledge of AI agents, LLM integration patterns, and how they apply to platform and backend engineering.

You'll own the platform layer that every product team builds on — API design, authorization, service interactions, and shared infrastructure — and lead it through a critical transition without dropping the reliability bar. It's a role with real authority, real scope, and direct impact on what Albert can deliver to the scientists who use it every day.

• Builder Mindset: Wants to create foundational systems that others build on.
• Curiosity: Genuine interest in how your work enables scientific discovery.
• Rigor: Commitment to quality — AI makes mistakes confidently, and our customers won't accept hand-waving.
• Collaboration: Partners effectively with engineers across Produce Engineering, AI/ML, Enterprise Engineering.
• Adaptability: Comfortable in a dynamic, fast-moving environment where priorities shift.

• Revenue from day one. The product is loved and used by thousands of users.
• Small team. Flexible hours. Collaboration over process.
• No micro-management. You'll own your work.
• Building software for a sustainable future.