Staff Platform Engineer

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced Staff Platform Engineer to help build and operate Acorn, Postscript's next-generation CDP and messaging platform: ~52 Rust/Python services on EKS, built to run at 500K+ events/sec for 20K+ merchants.

What makes this role different:

• The platform is agent-operated.
• Deploys, migrations, drift reconciliation, and infra standup are automated and encoded as self-verifying runbooks that AI agents execute.
• We are hiring the person who designs the system, writes the guardrails that let agents execute it safely, and owns the failures no runbook covers yet.

Primary duties:

• System & Platform Design: Own infra topology, scaling and blast-radius boundaries, the build/deploy graph, database ownership boundaries, and cost ceilings — the decisions agents execute but can't make.
• Guardrail Engineering: Build the validation gates, idempotency checks, drift detectors, and runbooks that keep both humans and agents from doing damage. Your deliverable is the safety system, not the deploy.
• Escalation Tier: Diagnose the novel failures — consumer lag, DLQs, materialized-view chains, consent ordering. Write the runbook the first time; agents handle it after.
• Reliability, Capacity & Cost: Own the 500K events/sec target: load testing, Karpenter/HPA tuning, Database sizing, SLOs and alerting.
• Security & Secrets Boundary: Own IAM/IRSA, secret rotation, the auth chain, and what the agent/MCP surface is allowed to do.
• Agent-Fleet Operability: Keep skills, runbooks, and agent context in sync with reality. A stale runbook is a wrong actor, executed confidently.
• Incident Leadership: Lead incidents and capture every fix as a new runbook plus regression test.

Qualifications

• 5+ years operating production Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS) at scale.
• Strong Terraform and GitOps/Kustomize practice, with a bias for making operations idempotent, automated, and self-verifying.
• Real incident-response experience on distributed-systems failures — databases, streaming, consumer lag, data integrity.
• You know how Postgres, a columnar store, and a log/streaming bus behave under load.
• Comfort working alongside AI agents — writing the guardrails, runbooks, and checks that let automation operate safely, and knowing where a human must stay in the loop.
• You reach for "encode this as a check" before "I'll remember to do this." You'd rather delete a manual step than document it. You treat a wrong runbook as a production bug.

Benefits

• Salary range of USD $190,000 to $230,000 base plus significant equity (we do not have geo based salaries).
• High growth startup - plenty of room for you to directly impact the company and grow your career!
• Work from home (or wherever).
• Fun - We’re passionate and enjoy what we do.
• Competitive compensation and opportunity for equity.
• Flexible paid time off.