Platform Engineer

About HUD

HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. We’ve raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

About the role

We’re looking for a platform engineer who can own the reliability, scale, performance, and developer experience of HUD’s core infrastructure and backend systems.

This is not a pure infrastructure role. The right person has strong production infra experience, but also thinks like a backend engineer: they can reason about service architecture, queues, databases, APIs, deployment safety, performance bottlenecks, and how product requirements translate into resilient systems. You’ll work across AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and backend services to make HUD faster, more reliable, cheaper to run, and easier for engineers to build on.

Responsibilities

Own production uptime, latency, provisioning speed, infrastructure cost, and incident response for core platform services

Build and maintain AWS infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Helm, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, networking, and secrets management

Design and improve backend and platform systems for scale, including capacity planning, autoscaling, queueing, backpressure, cleanup jobs, retries, and rollback paths

Define and improve dashboards, alerts, logs, traces, SLOs, runbooks, and on-call workflows so failures are detected, debugged, and resolved quickly

Build reliable CI/CD, release automation, environment management, and deployment workflows that improve developer productivity and reduce production risk

Write clean, maintainable code where needed to automate systems, improve backend services, and create internal tooling

Experience

You may be a good fit if you:

Have owned production cloud infrastructure for a high-availability, user-facing platform, with responsibility for uptime, performance, deployment safety, and cost

Have deep experience with AWS infrastructure and containerized systems; experience with tools like Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, load balancers, networking, and secrets management is strongly preferred

Have built or operated CI/CD, environment management, release automation, observability, alerting, and incident response systems

Have strong backend engineering judgment and can reason about service architecture, APIs, databases, async systems, queues, scaling limits, and production failure modes

Can write clean, maintainable code and apply strong software engineering judgment across product architecture, infrastructure, backend systems, and developer workflows

Strong candidates may also have:

Experience operating infrastructure for data-heavy, ML/AI, workflow, marketplace, developer-tools, or enterprise platforms

Experience designing systems for bursty workloads, long-running jobs, sandboxed execution, distributed workers, or high-concurrency services

Experience reducing cloud spend through better architecture, autoscaling, workload placement, caching, cleanup systems, or observability

Experience building internal platforms or tools that make engineers faster without hiding too much complexity

We prioritize technical aptitude, ownership, and learning potential over years of experience.

Team & company details

Team Size: ~15 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.

Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.

Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and high revenue growth. We’re scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

Logistics

Employment: Full-time.

Location: On-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US.

Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 1-week work trial.

What we offer

Competitive compensation based on experience and location

100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision from Blue Shield of CA

Lunch and dinner when you’re in the office

Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

Other perks including an Equinox membership, 401k, and commuter benefits

Unlimited access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at recruiting@hud.so or elsewhere if we missed your application!