Staff Platform Engineer (AI/ML)

Location: Remote-based, with a preference for candidates in the Seattle metro area, United States.

Salary: $126,000–$174,000 USD per year.

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm building AI co-workers and integrating them into enterprise operations for clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

• Define DevOps strategy and infrastructure architecture for multi-environment, multi-region cloud systems.
• Architect and operate scalable Kubernetes platforms, containerized infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code standards.
• Lead DevSecOps practices covering secrets management, compliance, auditing, IAM, and zero-trust networking.
• Own platform reliability, performance SLAs, cost optimization, observability, and production reliability practices.
• Lead cloud migrations, platform modernization, and AI/ML infrastructure initiatives including model serving, GPU orchestration, LLM gateways, vector stores, and CI/CD.
• Partner with engineering, product, and leadership; lead architecture reviews, mentor engineers, and act as a technical escalation point.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional DevOps or platform engineering experience, including leadership of complex platform initiatives.
• Expert scripting and programming skills in languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Bash.
• Deep expertise in at least one major cloud platform, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, DevSecOps, networking, IAM, security architecture, zero-trust principles, service mesh, distributed systems, and microservices.
• Strong AI/ML platform infrastructure experience, including model serving, GPU workload orchestration, LLM gateways, observability, vector stores, and AI/ML CI/CD.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentoring, stakeholder communication, problem-solving, and day-to-day expert use of AI tools such as Claude and Cursor.

Nice to have

• Cloud certifications such as AWS DevOps Engineer Professional, CKA, or Azure DevOps Engineer.
• FinOps experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-based work with collaboration across delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
• Paid time off and medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) benefits for eligible employees.
• Ownership-oriented, direct, craft-focused environment with experienced engineering teams.