Senior Platform Engineer

Job Description

About Authorium

Authorium is building the operating system for the infrastructure of democracy. We are a GovTech SaaS platform that unifies the massive, complex workflows—procurement, grants, and budgeting—that keep state and local governments running.

Our platform replaces fragmented spreadsheets and decades-old legacy systems with a unified data layer that manages billions of dollars in public funds. We serve the agencies that support millions of citizens, including California’s CDSS, CalPERS, and EDD, as well as major state agencies in Florida and Washington.

The Business: We are a 43-person company growing 45% YoY, with a clear path to profitability by Q4 2026. We have deep product market fit and are scaling to meet the demands of the world's most complex government agencies.

Why This Role Exists

We are establishing our San Francisco office as a strategic center for high-bandwidth engineering and product innovation. This is a foundational role for a senior engineer who thrives in an in-person, collaborative environment and wants to be "in the room" where our most complex architectural decisions are made.

While Authorium is a distributed company, our SF office is where we tackle our most intricate "war room" challenges—from modularizing our core domain to whiteboarding the next generation of our workflow engine. You will be a primary driver of the technical integrity of our platform, setting the quality bar and shipping the features that will power our next major phase of expansion.

What You Will Be Doing

Architecting the Platform: Own the most complex infrastructure work — designing internal developer platforms, CI/CD pipelines, deployment abstractions, and the foundational systems that product teams build on top of.
Technical Sovereignty: Make architectural decisions around reliability, scalability, and developer experience that hold up across multiple teams and services. You'll write ADRs and lead the modularization of platform primitives and shared infrastructure.
High-Bandwidth Collaboration: Work in-person (Monday–Thursday) with our SF engineering leadership to design platform capabilities, resolve production incidents, and translate engineering pain points into infrastructure solutions.
Technical Excellence: Set the standard for platform reliability. You'll lead infrastructure code reviews, define SLOs, and drive improvements to observability, automated testing, and deployment safety.
AI-Native Workflow: Use Cursor and Claude to automate infrastructure toil and focus on high-leverage platform design. You'll define our AI-first patterns for platform engineering — from AI-assisted runbooks to automated incident triage.

Requirements

Must Have

6+ years of professional experience in platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering, with strong fundamentals in distributed systems, networking, and cloud architecture.
Systems Thinker: Proven track record designing and operating reliable, scalable infrastructure — including service meshes, internal tooling, and developer-facing APIs or abstractions.
High-Agency: You identify platform gaps before they become incidents. You partner with engineering teams to turn reliability pain into well-scoped platform investments.
Security Minded: You treat security as a first-class platform concern — deep understanding of secrets management, network policies, IAM models, and supply chain security.
Quality Obsessed: A history of high-quality infrastructure-as-code, runbooks, and a drive to build self-service systems that reduce toil for the entire engineering org.
San Francisco Based: Energized by an in-office (Monday-Thursday) collaborative culture.

Nice to Have

AWS Depth: Hands-on experience with ECS/EKS, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC design, Parameter Store, and modern IaC tooling (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK).
Developer Experience Focus: Experience building internal platforms, golden paths, or self-service deployment tooling that measurably improves engineering velocity.
Regulated Industry Experience: Previous work in compliance-heavy environments such as GovTech, FinTech, or HealthTech (FedRAMP, SOC 2, HIPAA) — ideally with a focus on infrastructure compliance controls.
Observability & Reliability: Experience owning SLOs/SLAs, building out logging/metrics/tracing stacks (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.), and leading incident response.
Grow Stage Veteran: Previous experience at a company in the $5M–$30M ARR range where you were one of the senior-most individual contributors.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $170,000 - $230,000
Offers equity
100% benefits coverage for employee
401(k) plan
Flexible PTO
Home office stipend
Comprehensive wellness benefits
Commuter stipend for SF hybrid role

Compensation Range: $170K - $230K