Lead/Staff Platform Engineer

Role Description

We're looking for an experienced engineer to raise the bar on how our organization builds, tests, ships, and operates software - for both human engineers and AI coding agents.

• This is AI harness engineering: the discipline of making the fundamentals (CI/CD, testing, IaC, observability, secure delivery) so solid and well-shaped that agents can work productively inside them.
• Developer experience and platform engineering are a subset of that work.
• Security is inseparable from this; AI agents are accelerating both the pace and the shape of vulnerabilities.
• Your job is to raise the ceiling across the org - defining standards, building leverage, and helping teams level up their workflows, tooling, infrastructure, security posture, and necessary changes for AI Agents.

Key Responsibilities

• This is a hands-on lead role - you'll set direction and be deep in the code, infra, and pipelines yourself.
• Shape the platform and infrastructure that everything else runs on — the foundations product teams build on top of.
• Improve the full dev loop: local development, CI/CD, deployment, and production feedback.
• Define and drive standards around testing, IaC, observability, and secure delivery — and help product teams adopt them.
• Build shared tooling, templates, and golden paths that create real leverage — paved roads teams actually want to use.
• Own secure delivery end-to-end: unify security scanning, secrets management, dependency and supply-chain controls, and pen-testing workflows into the core pipeline.
• Stay ahead of the shifting security landscape as AI agents reshape both how vulnerabilities emerge and how they're exploited.
• Shape repos, tooling, and conventions so coding agents can navigate them efficiently.
• Measure impact against DORA metrics and qualitative signals from engineering teams.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background.
• Experience designing and building internal platforms.
• Deep experience with CI/CD, automated testing, IaC, and developer tooling.
• Strong grasp of modern software security and secure delivery practices (shift-left / SecDevOps).
• A product mindset toward internal tooling - treating engineers and agents as users.
• Real fluency with AI coding agents - how they work, where they fail, and what makes them effective.
• Understanding e2e test frameworks such as Playwright and how to scale them is a big plus.

Benefits

• Shape the Future of Software Creation: Redefining how ideas turn into reality.
• Massive Impact, Real Ownership: Full visibility into how your work moves the product and the company forward.
• ICs Are the Core: Individual Contributors are the highest-status role at Zencoder.
• High-Caliber Team & Founder: Work alongside exceptional AI and software engineers.
• Global & Flexible: Work from wherever you’re happiest and most productive.
• Aligned Incentives: Our equity plan ensures that when we succeed, you succeed.

Company Description

Zencoder is a universal AI platform focused on integrating generative coding workflows into existing developer tools and infrastructure.