Platform Engineer

About P-1 AI:

We are building an engineering AGI. We founded P-1 AI with the conviction that the greatest impact of artificial intelligence will be on the built world. Our first product is Archie, an AI engineer capable of quantitative intuition over physical product domains and engineering tool use. Archie initially performs at the level of an entry-level design engineer but rapidly gets smarter and more capable. We aim to put an Archie on every engineering team at every industrial company on earth.

Our founding team includes the top minds in deep learning, model-based engineering, and industries that are our customers. We closed a $23 million seed round led by Radical Ventures that includes a number of other AI and industrial luminaries (from OpenAI, DeepMind, etc.).

About the role:

We are looking for a Platform Engineer to own how Archie is deployed, operated, and scaled across complex customer environments. A core part of this role is building and evolving a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) deployment model, where Archie runs directly inside customer infrastructure. This is a foundational role at the intersection of infrastructure, product, and AI, where you will define the systems that allow our AI engineer to run reliably in real-world settings. You will be our first dedicated platform hire, responsible for building the substrate that every deployment depends on. As we scale, you’ll have a key role in shaping the entire platform engineering function.

This role can be either remote (based in the US or Canada and with existing work authorization) or based in our San Mateo Bay Area office. If you are remote, you should plan to spend one week per quarter co-working with the rest of the company in our San Mateo office, with the occasional team travel workshop in between. We will support relocation for candidates interested in moving to the Bay Area.

Why this role:

You will define and own the platform architecture elements that enable our AI systems to run reliably inside sensitive customer environments. This is a hard, high-leverage problem that sits at the core of our product.

What you’ll do:

• Design the BYOC deployment model for Archie across customer environments, including how systems are packaged, installed, and updated, and how they interact with P-1’s central systems.

• Build and own Kubernetes-based infrastructure that runs reliably across multiple clouds and customer setups.

• Create deployment tooling using Helm, GitOps, or similar approaches to make installation and operations repeatable.

• Implement secure and reliable update mechanisms that work even in restricted or locked-down network environments.

• Work closely with product, research, and forward-deployed engineers to translate requirements into platform capabilities.

• Debug and improve production deployments, identifying bottlenecks in performance, reliability, or operability.

• Establish observability, monitoring, and debugging patterns that give us visibility into distributed systems we don’t fully control.

Who you are:

• Have built and operated Kubernetes-based systems in production.

• Have designed infrastructure using IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or similar.

• Have implemented CI/CD or GitOps workflows that deploy systems across environments.

• You are comfortable working across cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and understand their core primitives.

• You have worked on systems that require strong security and networking considerations (e.g., VPCs, identity, encryption).

• You like owning problems end-to-end and are comfortable operating in ambiguous, 0-1 environments.

Our values:

Mission obsession & urgency: We are obsessed with building engineering AGI as quickly as possible. We also recognize that as a startup, speed is our most precious competitive advantage. We are constantly asking ourselves what we can do to go faster. We make tradeoffs and sacrifices (personally and in the workplace) in exchange for speed.

Intellectual excellence & curiosity: We ask “what if?” and experiment liberally. We always look for better ways of doing something. We read voraciously. We challenge each other to be better. We surround ourselves with A players and we actively and unapologetically reject B players (and even B+ players⸺because they tend to surround themselves with C players).

Shipping discipline: We treat production with respect. We test and demo our product constantly. We listen attentively to our customers, users, and stakeholders, and we respect our commitments to them. We also respect our commitments to each other and will go the extra mile (or ten or one hundred) to honor them.

Ownership: We all have significant ownership stakes in the company and operate in founder mode. We believe in hierarchical requirements but not in hierarchical information flows. If we see that something is broken or can be done better, we flag it and we fix it. We encourage each other to play with and fix anything and everything... but there’s a clear owner for everything.

Interview process:

• Initial screening call (30 mins)

• Biographical/behavioural interview (45 mins)

• Technical interview (60 mins)

• CEO interview (30 mins)

Compensation:

Salary: $200k - $250k.

This role includes a significant equity component. We are an early-stage startup, so we favor equity over cash in our current compensation philosophy. This role is best suited for candidates who value long-term ownership and impact over short-term cash optimization. Our benefits include healthcare, dental, and vision insurance, 401k with employer matching, unlimited PTO.