Staff Software Engineer, Platform

The Role

Your mandate is simple: increase shipping velocity and customer trust at the same time, by making the safe path the default path. You'll build the paved roads every team uses in production, and enforce minimum production standards through templates, CI/CD gates, scorecards, and time-bound exceptions, so every service is observable, reversible, and secure by default.

You will build and operate the secure, reliable, and scalable foundation that lets every product and AI team ship Nadia innovations faster and with lower risk. Platform Engineering is Valence's force multiplier: we own the shared control planes for trust and safety, global access and routing, LLM governance, deployment automation, workload isolation, observability and SLOs, and AI-native engineering execution.

About Valence

We're the only company pioneering leadership coaching for large enterprises in an AI-first way. Our mission is to transform how the world's biggest companies approach learning and development, helping teams work better together through AI-powered personalization that adapts to individual goals and organizational culture using the latest advances in machine learning and natural language processing.

What You'll Do

• Build the paved roads. Design and operate shared platform primitives used by multiple teams (authorization and routing guardrails, secure logging, rollout controls, observability, queue infrastructure, and the centralized LLM gateway) so teams build on standards instead of reinventing them.
• Makes change safe by default. Own the reliability and change-safety systems that let the org move fast without breaking trust: CI/CD gates, migration safety patterns, progressive delivery, rollback automation, and kill switches.
• Enforce security at the platform layer. Ship secure defaults, policy enforcement frameworks, auditability, and data-access guard libraries so the safe path is the easy path.
• Run global delivery controls. Implement single-domain strategy, region pinning and routing, residency-aware behavior, and cross-region config consistency checks for enterprise customers worldwide.
• Raise the operational bar. Establish SLOs, synthetic checks, alerting standards, and incident runbooks and drills that drive faster detection and recovery.
• Build the internal developer platform. Create service templates, blessed internal-tool paths, and standard deploy, monitoring, and auth patterns that make the right thing the default thing.
• Operate an AI-native engineering plane. Build issue-to-PR automation infrastructure with governance, human-in-control workflows, and audit logs that convert signals into auditable, human-approved execution outcomes.

What We're Looking For

• Technical foundation: 8+ years of experience in software engineering, distributed systems, infrastructure, or platform/SRE roles, with a track record of building systems other teams depend on.
• Platform mindset: You build reusable primitives, not one-off features. You think in terms of paved roads, secure defaults, and standards that scale across many teams.
• Reliability and change-safety expertise: Hands-on experience with CI/CD, progressive delivery, rollback and migration safety, observability, SLOs, and incident response.
• Cloud & deployment experience: Comfortable developing and operating services in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and working with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Security & compliance awareness: Familiarity with implementing platform-level guardrails (authorization, auditability, data-access controls, and policy enforcement) in a privacy- and residency-conscious way.
• Engineering excellence: Strong software engineering skills, including writing maintainable code, debugging distributed systems, and collaborating in cross-functional teams.
• Growth orientation: Eagerness to tackle unfamiliar problems, learn new technologies, and shape our platform and culture.
• Communication: Ability to explain technical ideas clearly and work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What You'll Get

• Ownership & Rapid Growth
• Outsized missions from day one, with direct responsibility for company-defining projects
• Work alongside the executive team with transparency into strategy and decision-making
• Influence on direction through real-time customer feedback and market insights
• AI-First Operator
• Work directly with cutting-edge AI models and next-generation platforms
• Build expertise in enterprise AI implementation across Fortune 500 companies and multiple industries
• Establish yourself as a recognized leader among peers in shaping how AI transforms work at a global scale
• Compensation
• Competitive salary including base + bonuses
• Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision) from day one
• Generous PTO, company-wide R&R shutdowns, and paid parental leave
• Retirement plan support for US and global employees
• Equity
• Meaningful ownership in a venture-backed company at a growth inflection point
• Financial upside that comes from scaling fast
• Top-up grants as we scale and you deliver exceptional performance — your compensation grows alongside your impact
• Top-Performing Culture
• A culture built for top talent: intensity to win, growth without limits, and a team that solves hard problems and celebrates big wins together