Staff+ Software Engineer, Deployment

Description

The company builds AI systems that are safe and beneficial for users and society. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, and it is a public benefit corporation. The team is growing quickly and includes researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders.

The team sits in the Infrastructure organization. It owns the pipelines, staged rollouts, gated promotion, rollback, runtime configuration, feature flags, and the systems that deliver code and artifacts to machines across a very large fleet.

Every change reaches production through these systems, whether it is new code, runtime configuration, a feature flag, or an infrastructure change. The goal is a quick, safe, and predictable route from change to production for every team.

You would own a large part of this work end to end, from design through running it in production.

Example projects include operator controls for progressive rollouts with pause and resume that keep rollout state, a deployment engine driven by fine-grained targets and their dependencies, rollouts that detect and avoid unhealthy clusters, adding a new workload type with its own rollout, verification, and rollback, a control plane that handles sudden bursts of agent-driven traffic, and a distribution system that delivers configuration and artifacts to every machine as the fleet grows.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for major parts of the deployment platform and own design, build, and operation end to end.
• Make rollouts safe by default, with staged delivery, promotion gated on health, automatic pausing and rollback, and deploy controls that teams operate themselves.
• Design APIs and abstractions that work well for both human engineers and AI agents.
• Bring new workload types and runtimes onto the platform, from Kubernetes to serverless and edge.
• Run runtime configuration and feature flag systems that validate changes, roll them out gradually, and revert quickly.
• Build infrastructure-as-code workflows that many teams depend on for routine changes.
• Scale artifact distribution so code and configuration reach machines fast and efficiently.
• Work with Security so the path to production is secure by default, using verifiable builds, least-privilege access, and auditable changes.
• Work with teams across the company to understand their deployment needs and move their workloads onto the platform.
• Take part in on-call and incident response, and turn what you learn into guardrails against repeat problems.

Requirements

• Required: proficiency in at least one backend or systems language, such as Rust, Go, C++, or Java.
• Required: experience leading the design, build, and production operation of distributed systems or infrastructure, including technical direction across teams.
• Required: hands-on work with cloud platforms and container orchestration, for example Kubernetes on AWS or GCP.
• Required: strong written and verbal communication.
• Preferred: experience building large-scale deployment, release, or change management systems.
• Preferred: experience with production on-call and incident response.
• Preferred: experience running Rust in production.
• Preferred: experience with GitOps and progressive delivery tools, such as Argo CD or Argo Rollouts.
• Preferred: deep Kubernetes knowledge, including controllers and operators.
• Preferred: experience running Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools at scale, including state management and locking.
• Preferred: experience building feature flag, experimentation, or dynamic configuration systems.
• Preferred: experience with artifact or package distribution, such as OCI registries, Nix, or content-addressed storage.
• Preferred: experience with software supply chain security, such as signed build provenance.
• Preferred: experience building high-throughput workflow engines or control planes backed by relational databases.
• Preferred: experience building internal developer platforms and driving adoption across many teams.
• Preferred: experience using AI agents in your own engineering work or building systems that agents operate.
• Minimum education is a bachelor's degree or an equivalent mix of education, training, and experience, in a field relevant to the role, shown through coursework, training, or professional work.
• Required years of experience depend on the internal job level for the position.

Conditions

Annual salary is $405,000 to $485,000 USD.

The role is hybrid. Staff are expected in an office at least 25% of the time, and some roles may require more.

The company sponsors visas, but cannot do so for every role and every candidate. If it makes an offer, it will make every reasonable effort to obtain a visa, and it retains an immigration lawyer to help.

Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every qualification, since people from underrepresented groups are more likely to doubt their own candidacy.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.
• An office space designed for collaboration with colleagues.