Staff Platform Engineer, AI

Location: Hybrid in Long Beach, California, or Denver, Colorado; at least 3 days per week onsite

Base salary: $200,000–$320,000 in Denver or $210,000–$330,000 in Long Beach per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous spacecraft, advanced payloads, mission software, and space-based interceptors for U.S. and allied space defense.

What you will do

• Lead the design and enterprise rollout of AI platform infrastructure, gathering requirements and aligning technical tradeoffs with stakeholders across business functions.
• Build and maintain API integrations, model access pipelines, MCP and tool-use connectors, and on-premises compute environments.
• Develop AI-powered applications and workflows connecting frontier models with project management, documentation, communications, and operational systems.
• Evaluate AI providers, tools, and platforms, and make build-versus-buy decisions based on capability, compliance, and speed to value.
• Partner with engineering, security, and IT to meet government security and compliance requirements across data classification levels.
• Mentor engineers and deliver AI enablement through workshops, office hours, documentation, and shared resources.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering, DevOps, or cloud engineering experience with technical leadership, roadmap ownership, architectural decision-making, and mentoring.
• Production software development experience, ideally with Python, TypeScript, or similar AI/ML tooling languages.
• Experience with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation, or agent frameworks such as CrewAI or Pydantic AI.
• Experience with CI/CD, continuous testing and monitoring, and production cloud workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining AI concepts to non-technical audiences and supporting cross-functional adoption.
• U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a Top Secret security clearance are required. ITAR eligibility is also required.

Nice to have

• Experience deploying AI or ML systems in government, defense, or regulated environments.
• Familiarity with AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, or IL4/IL5.
• Experience with model hosting, fine-tuning, benchmarking, cost evaluation, LLM evaluation frameworks, or model observability.
• Experience building knowledge retrieval, embedding, enterprise search, developer tooling, platform engineering, or internal tools.
• Active U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance.

Culture & Benefits

• Autonomous, high-visibility work with access to executive leadership and broad cross-functional impact.
• Health, dental, vision, HRA/HSA options, paid time off, and paid holidays.
• 401(k), parental leave, and equity participation.
• Hybrid work with onsite requirements that may increase when classified systems are involved.