The Mission: Every Student Deserves Technology That Never Fails Them

At Subject, we believe that educational technology should be invisible - it should just work, every time, for every student. As our Senior Platform Engineer II, you'll build the foundational AI-powered platform that enables our entire engineering organization to ship transformational educational features at 10x the industry standard.

We're on a mission to deliver premium, video-based education to every learner. Backed by Owl Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Ventures, and the CEOs of WHOOP, Cameo, and Aurora Solar, we need platform infrastructure that can scale from thousands to millions of students without breaking a sweat.

The Impact: Your Platform Will Enable 1 Million Students to Learn Without Limits

As our Senior Platform Engineer II, you'll orchestrate the AI-powered developer platform that makes our entire engineering team 10x more productive. This isn't about maintaining CI/CD pipelines or managing Kubernetes clusters. This is about building autonomous, self-healing infrastructure that lets our engineers focus on changing students' lives instead of fighting with tools.

What You'll Build:

AI-Powered Developer Platform

• Orchestrate multi-team AI initiatives enabling 10x developer productivity across 50+ engineers
• Build AI-assisted development environments that write boilerplate, catch bugs, and suggest optimizations
• Implement enterprise AI observability tracking every model inference, cost, and performance metric
• Create AI governance frameworks ensuring responsible use while maintaining velocity
• Design AI flywheel effects where every deployment makes the platform smarter
• Establish AI SLAs with 99.99% uptime for critical educational services

Autonomous Infrastructure at Scale

• Architect self-healing systems handling millions of daily student interactions with zero downtime
• Build predictive scaling that anticipates traffic before students even log in
• Create multi-region, multi-cloud infrastructure ensuring education never stops
• Implement chaos engineering practices that make our systems antifragile
• Design cost optimization algorithms saving $2M+ annually while improving performance
• Build platform abstractions that let product engineers ship features in hours, not weeks

Developer Force Multiplication

• Create internal tools that eliminate 80% of repetitive engineering tasks
• Build AI-powered debugging assistants that resolve issues before humans notice
• Implement automated performance optimization that keeps every service blazing fast
• Design golden paths that guide engineers to production with zero friction
• Establish platform standards adopted enthusiastically by every team
• Create documentation that developers actually want to read

Educational Infrastructure Innovation

• Build real-time data pipelines processing billions of learning events
• Create ML platforms that let any engineer deploy AI models safely
• Design edge computing strategies bringing education to low-bandwidth areas
• Implement privacy-first architectures protecting student data by default
• Build offline-first capabilities ensuring no student loses progress
• Create platform features that become Subject's competitive moat

The Technical Challenge:

Building a platform for AI-first education requires solving distributed systems problems that haven't been solved before.

Technical Requirements

• 7+ years of platform/infrastructure engineering with 3+ years leading platform teams or initiatives
• Cloud-native expertise (GCP strongly preferred) - You've built platforms handling millions of users
• Kubernetes mastery - Custom operators, service mesh, and cluster federation at scale
• Infrastructure as Code - Terraform/Pulumi at enterprise scale with GitOps workflows
• AI/ML platform experience - Building training pipelines, model serving, and experimentation platforms
• Polyglot systems - Go for performance-critical services, Python for ML, Node.js for developer tools
• Observability excellence - Distributed tracing, metrics, and logs that actually prevent incidents
• Security-first mindset - Zero-trust architectures, automated compliance, and student data protection

The Engineering Mindset We Need

• Platform as Product: Your users are engineers, and their productivity is your north star
• 10x Enablement: Every platform feature should make engineers dramatically more effective
• Proactive Excellence: Fix problems before anyone notices they exist
• Educational Empathy: Deep understanding that downtime means students can't learn
• Relentless Automation: If it happens twice, it should never require human intervention again
• Open Source Contribution: Share our innovations to lift the entire EdTech ecosystem

Why This Role Matters More Than Most

The Opportunity

• Force Multiplier Impact: Enable 20+ engineers to build features that impact 1M+ students
• Technical Leadership: Define platform architecture for the next decade of educational technology
• Industry Innovation: Build platform capabilities that don't exist anywhere else in EdTech
• Cost Revolution: Reduce infrastructure costs by $2M+ while improving performance
• Talent Magnet: Build tools so good that engineers join Subject just to use them
• Patent Potential: Create novel platform solutions worthy of intellectual property protection

The Team

You'll collaborate with:

• Experience engineers who chose mission over comfort
• Founders who've scaled startups from 0 to millions of users
• Self-taught engineers who've become industry experts through pure determination
• A leadership team that understands platform is the foundation of everything

The Resources

• Blank Canvas: Greenfield opportunity to build the platform right from the ground up
• Real Scale: Actual traffic and data to validate your architectural decisions
• Direct Impact: See your platform improvements immediately improve student outcomes
• Innovation Budget: Resources to experiment with cutting-edge technologies
• Learning Investment: Conferences, certifications, and continuous education support

What Success Looks Like

In 3 Months:

• Completed comprehensive infrastructure audit identifying critical bottlenecks and architectural debt
• Developed and executed action plan addressing top 3 critical platform issues blocking developer velocity
• Improved platform reliability to 99.9% uptime across all services
• Enabled 3+ major features to ship 2x faster through platform improvements
• Established yourself as the go-to platform architecture authority

In 6 Months:

• Achieved 40% YoY improvement in engineering productivity metrics
• Reduced infrastructure costs by $500K while handling 3x traffic
• Built AI platforms enabling any engineer to deploy ML models safely
• Recruited and mentored 1+ exceptional platform engineer to scale the team

In 12 Months:

• Created platform capabilities that become Subject's primary competitive advantage
• Drove $2M+ in cost savings through intelligent automation and optimization
• Established Subject as the technical leader in EdTech platform engineering
• Built systems handling 100M+ requests/day with sub-50ms p99 latency

The Commitment We're Looking For

This role demands exceptional dedication because millions of students depend on our platform never failing.

We're looking for someone who:

• Lives for Platform Excellence: Wakes up thinking about how to make infrastructure invisible
• Multiplies Others: Makes every engineer dramatically more productive through platform innovation
• Owns Everything: Takes responsibility for the entire platform, not just your piece
• Builds Movements: Creates platform culture that engineers evangelize

The Reality Check:

• Schedule: M-Th 8am-6:20pm, F 10am-5pm minimum in-office
• Availability: Weekend Slack/email checks 2x daily, on-call rotations
• Vacation: Even on PTO, 5-10 min daily check-ins required
• Location: Los Angeles or Austin, 5 days/week in office, live as close as possible

Compensation & Benefits

We pay for excellence and expect excellence in return:

• Base Salary: $275K - $350K based on impact potential
• Equity: Significant ownership - you're building the foundation of a unicorn
• Performance Multipliers: Bonuses tied to platform reliability and developer productivity
• Health & Performance: Premium health coverage, gym, daily meals, wellness support
• Hardware: Whatever you need to be productive - no expense spared on tools

How to Apply: Show Us Your Platform Vision

We want to see platforms you've built and problems you've solved:

1. Scale Story: Describe a platform you built that scaled from 1K to 1M+ users. Include architectural evolution, performance metrics, and lessons learned.
2. Developer Productivity: Share specific examples of how you've made engineers 5-10x more productive through platform improvements. Include metrics.
3. AI Platform Experience: Detail any ML/AI platform work - training pipelines, model serving, or experimentation frameworks.
4. Incident Leadership: Describe a critical platform incident you led, how you resolved it, and what you built to prevent recurrence.
5. Platform Philosophy: In 500 words, describe your vision for what a modern AI-first platform should enable.
6. Mission Alignment: Why does building technology for education matter to you? Why now?

Join Us in Building the Platform That Powers the Future of Education

If you're reading this and getting excited about building platform infrastructure that actually matters, you might be exactly who we're looking for. This isn't about building another generic platform - this is about creating the technical foundation that will educate millions of students.

Fair Warning: This role will consume your life. You'll dream about kubernetes configs and wake up thinking about latency optimization. Your friends might not see you for months. But you'll also build infrastructure that directly enables better educational outcomes for millions of students.

The Bottom Line: We're looking for someone who sees platform engineering not as a job, but as a craft. Someone who takes pride in systems that "just work." Someone who believes that great platforms multiply the impact of everyone who builds on them.

Ready to build the platform that transforms education?