Sr Staff Platform Engineer / Team Lead (AI)

Location: Cambridge, MA or West Lafayette, IN, United States

Salary: $169,800–$233,400 per year, plus short-term incentive, long-term equity, and a one-time new-hire stock option grant.

Company

hirify.global develops predictive design and multiplex gene-editing technologies to create more productive and sustainable agricultural products.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture and development of software systems, platform components, pipelines, and services for the Data & AI Platform.
• Build authentication and authorization patterns, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code foundations, and reusable deployment frameworks.
• Enable internal applications, workflows, APIs, shared services, and scalable engineering-platform capabilities.
• Develop infrastructure for AI-enabled systems, including agentic workflows, MCPs, model-adjacent services, and internal AI-platform capabilities.
• Integrate software engineering, data engineering, AI/ML, and scientific-computing platforms across AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, Quilt/S3, and Python.
• Set technical direction, review designs and code, establish standards, and lead a small team of engineers.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, systems engineering, data engineering, or a related technical role.
• 2+ years of technical leadership experience or experience leading engineering projects.
• Hands-on experience designing platform or systems architecture in data, AI, or scientific-computing environments.
• Proficiency in Python and practical experience with AWS, Kubernetes, serverless architecture, and container-based infrastructure.
• Experience building APIs, orchestration frameworks, data pipelines, workflow platforms, internal tools, or AI/ML infrastructure.
• Ability to influence technical direction and communicate trade-offs to engineering, product, science, and leadership audiences.

Nice to have

• Experience with MCPs or similar AI-agent integration frameworks.
• Familiarity with Airflow, Databricks, SageMaker, EKS, Quilt, MLflow, or related data and AI tooling.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or shared engineering services for multiple teams.
• Background in life sciences, agriculture, AgTech, biotech, or other scientific data and AI domains.
• Experience supporting production-grade AI, ML, RAG, agentic, or model-serving systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on infrastructure supporting scientific research, predictive design, AI, and agriculture.
• Benefits include PPO and HDHP health plans, a company-funded HSA, vision and dental coverage, and flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company matching and flexible paid time off.
• Compensation includes base pay, short-term incentive, long-term equity, and a new-hire stock option grant.
• Immigration sponsorship is available for candidates in certain qualified roles meeting performance criteria; H-1B sponsorship requiring the specified $100,000 fee is not provided.