Platform Engineer

About the Role

As a Platform Engineer, you’ll build and evolve the backend services and shared capabilities that power PlayerZero. You’ll work across application code, data models, integrations, and infrastructure to make the platform more reliable, maintainable, and easier to extend.

Our platform work spans communications, billing, shared services, and the runtime supporting AI agents. Your initial focus will reflect the team’s priorities and your strengths, with opportunities to contribute across these areas.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll deliver production code, guide architectural decisions, and improve existing systems through incremental changes. You’ll also partner with SRE to ensure the services you build are observable, deployable, and efficient to run.

What You Will Do

• Build and own platform services. Design, implement, and operate backend capabilities using Kotlin and the JVM.
• Evolve the architecture incrementally. Improve boundaries within a large codebase, reduce coupling, and simplify existing systems while keeping production stable.
• Design clear interfaces and data models. Build APIs, database models, and event-driven workflows that support reliable behavior across services.
• Deliver integrations and core workflows. Depending on your focus, build communications capabilities such as Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations, or billing capabilities such as usage processing, invoicing, and reconciliation.
• Extend the AI runtime. Develop an understanding of PlayerZero’s runtime and agent execution loops, and contribute to the services and interfaces they depend on.
• Engineer for production. Build in testing, security, instrumentation, and failure handling. Partner with SRE on CI/CD, deployment practices, and runtime performance.
• Raise engineering quality. Use design documents, focused pull requests, and thoughtful review to share knowledge, clarify tradeoffs, and help the team deliver effectively.

What You Bring

• Deep experience building and operating backend systems with Kotlin, including strong JVM fundamentals and familiarity with Gradle.
• Experience incrementally decomposing a large JVM application into clearer modules or services.
• Strong skills in API design, data modeling, databases, and distributed systems.
• A practical approach to architecture, with a track record of removing unnecessary complexity and delivering improvements in manageable steps.
• Ownership of technical work from design through production, including troubleshooting and maintaining the systems you build.
• The ability to lead through technical judgment, clear writing, code review, and collaboration.
• Curiosity about AI agents and a willingness to learn their runtime and operational requirements.
• Experience with TypeScript, Rust, or vector stores is also useful.
• Experience in either of the following areas would be particularly valuable:
• Communications: Building and operating Slack or Microsoft Teams applications at scale, including multi-tenant OAuth and reliable event handling.
• Billing: Usage-based billing, ledger correctness, idempotency, reconciliation, append-only corrections, and integrations with platforms such as Orb, Metronome, or Stripe.

What Success Looks Like

• The services you own are reliable and easier to change.
• Platform capabilities reach production through focused, well-tested changes, and architectural improvements reduce complexity.
• Clear interfaces, useful instrumentation, and consistent deployment practices help the broader engineering team build with confidence.