Staff Platform Engineer

Join Citizen Health as a Staff Platform Engineer, where you'll build and own the infrastructure that powers our AI-driven healthcare platform. This hands-on technical leadership role involves setting the direction for platform engineering, writing code, and raising the bar for production operations. You'll collaborate with various teams to ensure platform performance, security, and compliance with healthcare standards. As the first dedicated infrastructure hire, you'll have the opportunity to build the platform engineering function from the ground up.

• Set the technical direction for the platform, design architectures that handle long-running AI agent sessions, real-time message delivery, and autonomous tool execution.
• Define SLOs, build the observability stack, drive incident response, and keep uptime high. Make on-call sustainable and ensure that issues are addressed promptly.
• Own the deployment pipeline end-to-end, eliminate friction in the inner and outer loops so teams can ship to production with confidence.
• You thrive in early-stage environments where the team is small, the scope is broad, and the best answer hasn't been written in a runbook yet. You default to data, automate the toil, and document what you learn. You've worked at a startup before (ideally sub-50 people) and you liked it
• You've been the person who saw a scaling wall six months before it became a crisis, made the case to rearchitect, and then did the work. You've led infrastructure through a meaningful inflection — 10x traffic growth, launch into a new channel, migration from monolith to services — and you can talk concretely about what broke, what you learned, and what you'd do differently
• Demonstrated experience scaling infrastructure through a significant growth inflection (10x users, new product surface, architectural migration) in a production environment
• Deep expertise running production systems on a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, network segmentation, vulnerability management, supply-chain security
• Proven track record designing for high availability, zero-downtime releases, and graceful degradation in regulated or data-intensive environments
• 8+ years of software / infrastructure engineering experience; 4+ years in a senior IC or technical leadership role on a Platform, SRE, or DevOps team
• Strong programming skills in at least one of Go, Python, or TypeScript — you build tooling, not just configure it
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you're equally effective in a post-mortem, a roadmap discussion, and a Slack thread
• Experience at an early-stage or high-growth startup where you owned infrastructure broadly, not just a narrow slice
• Hands-on with Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), and modern CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Spinnaker, etc.)
• Experience with messaging infrastructure at scale — message queues, webhook reliability, delivery guarantees, rate limiting (WhatsApp, SMS, or similar)
• Familiarity with FHIR / HL7 or other healthcare data standards
• Experience growing a Platform or SRE function from a small group of generalists into a specialized team
• Familiarity with agentic AI systems, multi-agent orchestration, or long-running autonomous workflows
• Experience supporting AI/ML workloads in production — model serving, inference optimization, GPU infrastructure, vector databases, or large-scale data pipelines. This is close to a must-have given our architecture
• Background in healthtech, life sciences, fintech, or other regulated domains (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, FedRAMP)
• Don't meet every qualification? We believe that passion, curiosity, and the right mindset matter as much as a checklist of skills. If you're excited about what we're building, we encourage you to apply