Staff Software Engineer, App Platform

About the Role

As a Staff Platform Engineer at Fieldguide, you will design and build the foundational platform that powers Fieldguide, including core platform services and tooling that make it fast, safe, and consistent to deliver new capabilities to customers. This is the platform on which every product surface and AI agent at Fieldguide is built.

You will operate as a technical leader across teams, defining standards and reducing complexity for product, AI, and infrastructure engineers. Your work will directly shape how Fieldguide can ship quickly for our largest enterprise customers while keeping our systems reliable and scalable.

Our engineering hub is located in San Francisco. This role is open to remote candidates anywhere in the US; Bay Area-based employees will work in a hybrid setting.

What You’ll Own

• Lead the design and evolution of Fieldguide's core platform services, including the foundational systems, APIs, and shared primitives that every product surface and agent depends on
• Build platform capabilities that compound the leverage of product and AI engineers, turning hard problems into reusable building blocks
• Define the architecture for how new product capabilities get delivered across our SaaS, enterprise single-tenant, and government-cloud environments
• Partner directly with product, design, and AI engineering leaders to understand customer needs and translate them into platform investments
• Drive cross-team initiatives that improve product velocity, system reliability, and consistency across the application
• Own the standards for service design, data modeling, and platform integration patterns used across Fieldguide
• Maintain and evolve the internal developer platform that supports the team, including deployment tooling, and agentic engineering capabilities
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers across the org and raise the bar for platform engineering at Fieldguide

Who You Are

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant time spent building product-facing platforms or foundational application services
• Strong product instincts and a track record of shipping platform capabilities that unlocked meaningful customer outcomes
• Deep experience designing APIs, services, and shared systems that other engineers build on top of
• Strong fluency with modern cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Kubernetes, and distributed systems
• Track record of operating as a technical leader across multiple teams without owning them directly
• Excellent judgment on what to build into the platform, what to leave to product teams, and what to buy
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to contribute to and review complex codebases
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to drive alignment across engineering, product, and design
• High agency and a bias toward owning problems end-to-end

Bonus Points

• Experience building platforms that power AI-native products, including agent frameworks, model orchestration, or LLM-powered application surfaces
• Experience designing platforms that support both multi-tenant SaaS and single-tenant enterprise deployments
• Experience as a founding or early platform engineer at a vertical SaaS or enterprise AI company