Platform Engineer - Developer Infrastructure

Job Title: Staff Platform Engineer - Developer Infrastructure

Department: Software

Employment Type: Full-Time

Location: Houston, TX

Travel: 10%

Persona AI is building humanoid robots for the most demanding environments in heavy industry — shipyards, steel mills, fabrication facilities, and offshore platforms — performing welding, grinding, maintenance, inspection, and material‑handling work that is dangerous, physically demanding, and increasingly difficult to staff.

We are backed by leading strategic and financial investors and engaged with global industrial leaders across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Singapore. Korea is the center of gravity for our early commercial strategy, anchored by relationships with the world’s leading shipbuilders and steelmakers. Our work spans both the robot platform itself and the systems, partners, and playbooks required to deploy it at scale.

• We offer competitive compensation, a performance‑based bonus, 99% employer covered medical benefits, early‑stage equity, competitive PTO, and a company‑wide paid winter break between December 24th and January 2nd.

• You’ll shape technology that’s redefining the possibilities of robotics and human interaction.

• Work alongside passionate teammates who value creativity, and continuous learning.

Our robots are built by a small team that ships fast and deploys onto hardware in customer facilities. Between a laptop and a running humanoid there are: a C++/Python/Rust monorepo, an ARM
64 cross‑compile matrix, kernel modules and a real‑time patch set, container images that have to land on Jetson devices, and a rollout process that cannot brick a robot several timezones away.
Today that path is held together by the engineers who also write control code. Your job is to own it so they don’t have to. Success is measured in build times, time‑to‑first‑commit for a new engineer, deployment frequency, and the number of infrastructure problems the rest of the team stops thinking about.

This is not a cloud‑only role. Roughly half the surface area is physical: lab networks, robot dev boxes, bench and HIL fixtures, on‑site LAN infrastructure, and the mirrors that let a deployment site work with no internet at all.

Build and CI

• The build graph for a mixed C++/Python/Rust/CUDA monorepo: involving incremental correctness, remote caching, and cross‑compilation for AMD
  64 dev boxes and ARM
  64 targets.

• Our CI capacity: self‑hosted runners, GPU and hardware‑attached runners, and the queue discipline that keeps PR feedback under ten minutes.

• Reproducibility: A build from a tagged commit six months from now should produce a bit‑identical artifact.

Release and fleet delivery

• Versioning, artifact promotion, and the container registry / package mirrors that back it.

• Safe, resumable, bandwidth‑aware rollout to robots - staged channels, canary robots, and rollback that works over a bad link.

• Signing and provenance for anything that lands on a robot.

Developer platform

• Reproducible dev environments across laptops, shared dev machines, and robots.

• Self‑service tooling so an autonomy engineer can get a branch onto a robot without filing a ticket or learning Kubernetes.

• Onboarding path: a new engineer builds, tests in sim, and deploys to a bench robot on day one.

Infrastructure and observability

• Cloud and on‑prem compute, storage for multi‑TB robot logs, and the training/simulation cluster's operational layer.

• Fleet observability: metrics, logs, and traces from robot to dashboard.

• Site infrastructure for deployments: VPN/overlay networking, local mirrors, offline‑capable registry authorization.

• 8+ years operating production infrastructure for a software engineering org, with direct…