Harper (harperinsure.com) Logo

Harper (harperinsure.com)

Platform Engineer

Reposted Yesterday
In-Office
San Francisco, CA, USA
140K-280K Annually
Mid level
In-Office
San Francisco, CA, USA
140K-280K Annually
Mid level
Build and maintain core infrastructure (databases, AWS, networking, CI/CD) powering thousands of concurrent AI operations. Own reliability (SLOs, on-call, incident response), observability, orchestration of agentic workloads, developer tooling to increase velocity, and evaluation systems measuring AI output quality and cost.
The summary above was generated by AI
The Problem

36 million businesses in America need insurance—it's not optional. 77% are underinsured. 40% have no coverage at all. The distribution system failed them: too slow, too opaque, too confusing.

Over 90% of commercial insurance is still human-led. We're building the inverse: 90%+ AI-led, pushing toward the higher 90s. Not by patching legacy workflows—by building AI that makes humans more effective, improves the customer experience, and eliminates friction at every step.

We're adding ~1,000 customers per month. We've grown 100x since last year. We're looking to do even more this year—and that's why we're hiring.

You build the systems the rest of engineering depends on. When they compound, everyone gets faster.

The Thesis

Harper runs 200+ services across Railway and AWS. We orchestrate N parallel agentic workloads. Our AI systems make thousands of decisions a day, and every decision needs to be traceable, evaluated, and cheaper to run tomorrow than it is today. The infrastructure underneath all of that is the difference between a company that scales and one that stalls.

Great platform engineering here isn't invisible—it's the reason product ships fast. When observability catches a silent failure before a customer does. When a pooling layer makes connection exhaustion a non-issue. When developer velocity doubles because someone built the tool nobody knew they needed. That leverage compounds across every other engineer on the team.

The Role

You're an infrastructure-focused engineer with depth across databases, AWS, networking, observability, SRE, CI/CD, and AI tooling. You build the systems and tooling the rest of engineering depends on—optimized for performance, reliability, and developer velocity.

You work directly with founders and alongside the product engineers who ship features on top of what you build. You see where things break at scale, design the fix, and ship it before it becomes a fire. When something goes wrong at 2 AM, you're the one who gets paged—and you'd rather build the system that prevents the page than accept it as inevitable.

We are hiring platform engineers across all levels, which we determine during the interview process.

What You'll Do

  • Own core infrastructure — Databases, AWS services, networking, CI/CD; the systems every engineer depends on

  • Build for scale — Thousands of concurrent AI operations, sub-second response times, cost-effective under load

  • Design observability that works — System-level errors AND business-level silent-failure detection; we find out something is broken from an alert, not from a person hours later

  • Orchestrate agentic workloads — N parallel agent instances doing non-deterministic work, running reliably and cost-effectively as N grows

  • Multiply developer velocity — The tooling and abstractions that let product engineers ship in days instead of weeks

  • Own reliability end-to-end — SLOs, on-call, incident response, and the post-mortems that make it rarer next time

  • Build the eval infrastructure — Systems that measure whether AI outputs are getting better, not just running

You Might Be a Fit If...

  • You've owned production systems at scale—not contributed to, owned; you got paged when they broke

  • You write code with AI (Cursor, Claude Code) and know how to leverage it for infrastructure work

  • You have depth across at least two of: databases, cloud infrastructure (AWS), networking, observability, or CI/CD

  • You've designed systems that survive real load—retries, DLQs, back pressure, idempotency, the whole stack

  • You care about developer experience—the tools other engineers use are as much your product as the customer-facing ones

  • You'd rather build the system that prevents the fire than firefight forever

Requirements

  • Software engineering experience with a platform, infrastructure, or SRE focus (level determined during interviews)

  • Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar

  • Production experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS), databases (Postgres), and observability tooling

  • Track record of building systems and tooling that other engineers depend on

  • Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

  • Experience orchestrating AI/ML workloads at scale (agent frameworks, LLM inference infrastructure)

  • Voice AI or real-time systems experience

  • Deep AWS experience (ECS, Lambda, RDS, VPC design)

  • Prior startup experience—especially at companies that scaled through hypergrowth

Compensation & Logistics

  • Salary: $140,000–$280,000 depending on experience + performance bonuses & equity

  • Location: San Francisco, in-office. Based in SF or willing to relocate.

  • Schedule: Monday–Friday, very early morning start, in-office five days a week.

  • Benefits: Uber commuter benefits; breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided; snacks, drinks, and coffee daily; free gym membership; health, dental, and vision insurance.

The Process

  1. Technical screen — 60 min remote: project deep dive + system design

  2. Super Day on-site — meet the team, sit in on the operation, do real work alongside us.

     
To Apply

If you want to build AI capabilities against business problems you discover yourself, ship code that runs a real business, and work with people who show up with the same intensity every day—send your resume and a link to something you've built that had measurable business impact.

Similar Jobs

5 Days Ago
Hybrid
San Francisco, CA, USA
150K-205K Annually
Senior level
150K-205K Annually
Senior level
Fintech • Machine Learning • Payments • Software • Financial Services
Lead development and delivery of Workday solutions across HCM, Recruiting, Compensation, Payroll and Benefits. Design and build complex Workday integrations and automation using web services (SOAP/REST), WSDL, XML, XSLT and Workday Studio. Provide technical leadership, code reviews, unit testing, and coach a team of integrators/configurators while partnering with product owners and HR stakeholders to optimize processes and platform performance.
Top Skills: APIsRestSoapWorkdayWorkday ExtendWorkday StudioWsdlXMLXslt
8 Days Ago
Remote or Hybrid
United States
Expert/Leader
Expert/Leader
Software
Own the technical vision and architecture for an AI platform of agents, skills, and tools. Scale retrieval/knowledge systems, build developer experience, orchestration, observability, and evaluation/feedback loops. Align cross-division engineering strategy and drive platform adoption.
Top Skills: APIsBraintrustData PipelinesEmbeddingsKnowledge GraphsLangfuseLanggraphLangsmithLlamaindexLlmsMcpMulti-Agent OrchestrationObservability PlatformsPythonRag PipelinesRetrieval SystemsVector Databases
9 Days Ago
Remote or Hybrid
US
115K-130K Hourly
Mid level
115K-130K Hourly
Mid level
Big Data • Fintech • Information Technology • Insurance • Software
Automate cloud infrastructure as code, build developer tooling, administer Kubernetes and platform services, improve CI/CD and observability, collaborate with product teams, run on-call rotation and manage incident runbooks to ensure platform reliability and developer productivity.
Top Skills: ArgocdBashCircleCIClaude CodeCloudFormationDatadogDockerGCPGitGitGitlab CiGoJenkinsKubernetesNew RelicPostgresPulumiPulumi CloudPythonTerraformTypescript

What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.

Key Facts About San Francisco Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
  • Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
  • Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account