Production Engineer

About the Company

Placer.ai (“Placer”) is one of the fastest-growing tech companies in North America, reaching $100 million ARR “Centaur” status in 2024 within six years of launching. The company previously crossed the $1B valuation “Unicorn” threshold in 2022. Our A.I.-based SaaS platform transforms how leaders make critical decisions by unlocking unparalleled visibility into markets and locations, creating a blue ocean market of over $100B. We lead a privacy-first business where data is stripped of user identifiers and only aggregated information is provided. The platform offers instant visibility into almost any location in the U.S. and serves over 4,000 paying customers, including Fortune 500 companies like JP Morgan Chase, Wayfair, and Google. Named one of Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers and a Deloitte Technology Fast company, we pride ourselves on a collaborative, innovative, and inclusive culture.

About the Role

We're looking for a Production Engineer to own the infrastructure behind one of the world's largest location analytics platforms—from CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments to developer tooling and observability. This is a hands-on, end-to-end ownership role at the intersection of scale, reliability, and engineering velocity.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve Placer's GCP infrastructure end-to-end—multi-cluster GKE, Terraform via Atlantis, ArgoCD GitOps
• Drive CI/CD pipeline reliability and developer tooling—reduce friction, increase release velocity
• Manage production and development environments across multiple workloads with high availability requirements
• Build and maintain observability systems—dashboards, alerting, and incident response that keep the team ahead of failures
• Identify and resolve performance, scalability, and reliability bottlenecks before they become incidents
• Collaborate directly with engineering teams to shape infrastructure decisions from design through deployment
• Introduce new tools, standards, and frameworks—you define the approach, not just execute it

Requirements

• 5+ years in a Production Engineering, SRE, or Platform Engineering role at a SaaS product company
• 3+ years of hands-on Kubernetes in production—not just deployment, but operating and scaling it
• 2+ years with IaC tools—Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent at real scale
• Experience managing production databases and queues—PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or similar
• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language—Python, Go, or Ruby
• Strong monitoring and alerting fundamentals—you build the systems that catch problems before users do

Nice to Have

• GCP experience—this is our primary cloud
• CKA certification or deep Kubernetes ecosystem knowledge—CNIs, service meshes, operators, ingresses
• Experience with RabbitMQ or Kafka at scale
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows—ArgoCD or equivalent

Why Join Placer.ai?

• Join a rocketship—we are pioneers of a new market that we are creating
• Take a central and critical role at Placer.ai
• Work with, and learn from, top-notch talent

Pay

The U.S. annualized pay range for this position is $190,000 - $210,000 USD. Base pay may vary depending on job-related skills, professional experience, education, work location, and compensation market data. Certain roles may also have the opportunity to earn sales-based commissions.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Flexible time off
• 401K
• Equity awards for certain roles