Platform Engineer Job Washington area,District of Columbia USA,IT/Tech

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense‑tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V‑BAT and X‑BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia‑Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on Linked In, X, Instagram, and You Tube.

Job Description This position may be based in San Diego, CA;
Dallas, TX;
Washington, D.C.; or other Shield AI locations.

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to help design and implement the internal technology platforms that power our engineering, autonomy, and enterprise operations environments.

In this highly technical individual contributor role, you will serve as a senior technical expert responsible for designing and evolving scalable, secure, and highly automated platform infrastructure spanning cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. You will work closely with engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to establish platform architecture, develop paved paths for developers, and implement automation that improves reliability, security, and development productivity across engineering teams.

This role is ideal for an experienced platform engineer who thrives at the intersection of systems architecture, automation, and developer enablement, and who enjoys building the foundational systems that allow engineering organizations to move quickly and safely.

What you'll do:

Platform Architecture & Engineering

Build and evolve scalable internal platform infrastructure supporting engineering workloads across public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem environments.
Design and implement platform capabilities that enable standardized, secure, and repeatable application deployment of applications and services.
Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code frameworks and reusable platform modules to accelerate engineering productivity.
Establish and evolve “paved path” platform patterns that simplify secure software delivery for engineering teams.

Automation & Developer Enablement

Build automation and developer tooling that improves software delivery and engineering productivity.
Contribute to and improve CI/CD pipelines, artifact management, and developer platform tooling.
Collaborate with engineering teams to reduce operational friction and improve system observability, resilience, and reliability.
Develop internal tools, platform integrations, and automation frameworks that streamline engineering workflows across the organization.

Infrastructure & Systems Engineering

Design, implement, and operate highly available infrastructure platforms supporting mission‑critical engineering systems.
Implement scalable platform solutions across cloud and on-prem environments including compute, networking, identity, and storage.
Partner with security teams to embed strong security controls, auditability, and compliance requirements into platform architectures.
Evaluate and introduce new technologies that improve system scalability, security, and operational efficiency.

Required Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of experience in platform engineering, Dev Ops, infrastructure engineering, or site reliability engineering roles supporting large‑scale systems.
Deep hands‑on experience designing, building and operating cloud or hybrid infrastructure platforms, including networking, identity, compute, and storage systems.
Strong expertise with Infrastructure as Code and automation frameworks (e.g.,…