Staff Platform Engineer - AI
Role details
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Tech stack
Job description
We're looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to be a senior technical voice on a brand-new team building the platform that helps Datavant teams run AI agents safely and reliably. You bring the seniority that comes from designing and operating platforms others have depended on, and the discipline that comes from doing it in regulated environments where audit, identity, and policy are real, not theoretical. You write code daily, prefer shipping the smallest thing that solves the problem to designing the perfect solution that doesn't ship, and build guardrails rather than gates.
You partner widely without claiming territory that isn't yours. You believe a platform is only adopted when it makes the secure, observable, governed path the easiest path. You mentor when you're the most senior person in the room, ask questions when you're not, and treat decisions as artifacts that get written down so reviewers can reconstruct the reasoning months later.
We practice compound engineering: each platform component we ship is also an investment in how the next one gets built. We work in tight loops (build, evaluate, refine, codify) and treat the patterns we learn as artifacts encoded into tooling, templates, and reusable substrate rather than tribal knowledge. As a Staff Engineer, you set this tempo as much as you participate in it.
What You Will Do
- Help shape the AI Platform's core architecture alongside the VP of AI Platform Engineering and a small group of senior engineers.
- Establish the platform's technical contracts: how agents register, how they prove identity, how their actions get attributed, audited, and constrained at runtime.
- Set the technical bar for the team. Mentor two to three engineers, review the work that ships, and author the design documents future hires will read to understand how things are built.
- Design how the AI Platform interlocks with the rest of engineering: the platform teams whose substrate it builds on, and the product teams whose work it serves.
- Carry the pager. Operate what you build.
Requirements
- Ten or more years as a software engineer building production platforms, with at least three at Staff IC level or equivalent technical-lead seniority.
- Deep experience designing and operating cloud-native, Kubernetes-based platforms in production. AWS experience is a plus.
- Hands-on fluency with at least one mainstream LLM application stack (LangGraph, Bedrock AgentCore, or equivalent), or strong adjacent platform experience plus willingness to learn quickly.
- Depth in workload identity and access management: service identity, short-lived credentials and token exchange, and key management (SPIFFE/SPIRE, OAuth token exchange, KMS-backed signing, or equivalent).
- Strong written communication. Architecture decision records and design documents are reviewed before implementation begins on this team.
- You operate as a peer to senior engineers and leaders outside your team, not as a customer.
- Personal experience using AI tools in your own engineering work (Claude Code, Cursor, custom MCP servers, agentic side projects, or similar) is valued. We want teammates who use the tools they build platforms for.
- Healthcare data experience (PHI, HIPAA, BAA workflows) or other regulated-platform background (FedRAMP, HITRUST / HITRUST AI, NIST AI RMF, SOC 2 Type 2) is a strong plus.
Benefits & conditions
We are committed to building a diverse team of Datavanters who are all responsible for stewarding a high-performance culture in which all Datavanters belong and thrive. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other legally protected status.
At Datavant our total rewards strategy powers a high-growth, high-performance, health technology company that rewards our employees for transforming health care through creating industry-defining data logistics products and services.
The range posted is for a given job title, which can include multiple levels. Individual rates for the same job title may differ based on their level, responsibilities, skills, and experience for a specific job.
The estimated total cash compensation range for this role is:
$220,000-$270,000 USD
To ensure the safety of patients and staff, many of our clients require post-offer health screenings and proof and/or completion of various vaccinations such as the flu shot, Tdap, COVID-19, etc. Any requests to be exempted from these requirements will be reviewed by Datavant Human Resources and determined on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the state in which you will be working, exemptions may be available on the basis of disability, medical contraindications to the vaccine or any of its components, pregnancy or pregnancy-related medical conditions, and/or religion.