Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Postscript is an AI messaging platform trusted by more than 20,000 Shopify brands and provides SMS marketing and AI revenue-driving features. The Staff Platform Engineer will build and operate the Acorn CDP and messaging platform, designing infrastructure systems, safety guardrails, reliability practices, security boundaries, and agent-operated runbooks while leading incident response.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
- Significant equity
- 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
- Flexible paid time off
- Competitive compensation and opportunity for equity
Company Overview