Platform Engineer

Sage Recruiting is partnering with an AI-native, early-stage infrastructure startup that's tackling a problem every engineering leader is quietly panicking about: AI coding agents now write code faster than any human team can review it, and the old ways of enforcing standards (wikis, checklists, manual review) were never built for that volume. Our client has built a guardrails engine that turns a company's engineering standards into automated enforcement, on every commit, every pull request, and every deploy, for human and AI-written code alike.

They're small, senior, and heavily AI-leveraged, moving with the speed and focus of a team several times their size. They've already landed their first paying customers and have real momentum building. Top-tier venture investors and an angel bench of well-known operators and creators from the developer tools world back them. This is a company at an inflection point between "early traction" and "real scale," actively going live with large enterprise customers, and this hire is one of the people who will build the infrastructure that the next chapter runs on.

This is a staff-level, deeply technical individual contributor role for a true backend/cloud/ops generalist. You'll be handed meaty, ambiguous problems and trusted to own them end-to-end: design, build, ship, and fix, with a seat in the on-call rotation like everyone else on the team. You'll write and own production Go code for the core platform, and you'll design and run the AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure it lives on, across both a hosted service and customer-managed deployments.

A big part of the job is taking early, minimal product surfaces and making them enterprise-ready: authentication, backup, availability, and the reliability bar that large customers expect. You'll stay hands-on while helping decide what gets built and how, and you'll work directly with the company's forward-deployed engineers and customer platform teams on hard deployment and scale problems, feeding what you learn back into the product.

• You're a senior Platform Engineer who's comfortable working in code and cloud infrastructure.
• You're comfortable being handed an ambiguous, high-stakes problem and can be trusted to run with it end-to-end without a fleshed-out playbook.
• You think like a startup engineer: you know where the smart trade-offs are, where it's fine to cut a corner, and where it isn't, rather than defaulting to the most complete or "correct" solution.
• You lean Kubernetes-strong in particular.
• You're AI-native in your daily workflow, and you're excited by the idea of taking a product that's complete but still early and making it ready for large enterprise customers.

• Write and maintain production Go code in the backend and supporting services, owning features from design and testing through deployment and ongoing operation
• Design and evolve the AWS architecture and Kubernetes infrastructure, making deliberate trade-offs around reliability, security, performance, cost, and how much complexity a small team can support
• Build reusable Terraform modules, Helm charts, and deployment tooling that make provisioning, upgrades, and recovery repeatable, for the hosted service and customer-managed installations alike
• Harden early-stage product surfaces to meet enterprise expectations: authentication, backups, availability, and the operational maturity large customers require
• Improve production reliability: useful metrics and alerts, capacity planning, backups and tested recovery, safe rollouts, and clear rollback paths. Take your turn in the on-call rotation and fix the root causes of recurring problems, not just the symptoms
• Debug across the full stack, following a failure through Go…