Staff Platform Engineer

The Opportunity

We're looking for an experienced engineer to raise the bar on how our organization builds, tests, ships, and operates software - for both human engineers and AI coding agents.

This is AI harness engineering: the discipline of making the fundamentals (CI/CD, testing, IaC, observability, secure delivery) so solid and well-shaped that agents can work productively inside them. Developer experience and platform engineering are a subset of that work. When the harness is good, humans ship faster and agents stop getting stuck on things that shouldn't be hard.

Security is inseparable from this. AI agents are accelerating both the pace and the shape of vulnerabilities, and secure delivery has to be built into the same stream as everything else - not bolted on. 

Product teams own their services, pipelines, and tests. Your job is to raise the ceiling across the org - defining standards, building leverage, and helping teams level up their workflows, tooling, infrastructure, security posture, and necessary changes to get the most out of coding agents.

Key Responsibilities

This is a hands-on lead role - you'll be deep in the code, infra, and pipelines yourself.

• Shape the platform and infrastructure that everything else runs on - the foundations product teams build on top of;
• Improve the full developer loop: local development, remote agents, CI/CD, deployment, observability;
• Build shared tooling, templates, and golden paths that create real leverage - paved roads teams actually want to use;
• Stay ahead of the shifting security landscape as AI agents reshape both how vulnerabilities emerge and how they're exploited.

Essential Qualifications

• Strong software engineering background - you will be building both tooling and managing core infrastructure in this role;
• Real fluency with AI coding agents - how they work, where they fail, and what makes them effective;
• A product mindset toward internal tooling - treating engineers and agents as users, and measuring whether the platform actually makes them faster;
• Deep experience with CI/CD, automated testing, IaC, Cloud and developer tooling;
• A passion for software security and secure delivery practices (shift-left / SecDevOps etc) in both the classical context and the new AI agent context.

Why Join Hops?

• Impact. AI is reshaping how work gets done, and you'll be at the forefront of that shift, building Hops, a product that enables teams to get more done with AI. Hops is the platform our own business runs on, so you'll see how your work lands right away.

• AI-First. We use AI to expand what one person can accomplish. You'll constantly rethink how you work: what to hand over to AI, and where your own judgment matters most.

• Ownership. We keep the team small and give people real scope, autonomy, and equity. You'll take initiative, make decisions, and see your work through to real outcomes, and when the company wins, you win.

• High Talent Density. A small team of highly capable people moves faster and builds better. You'll work directly with senior teammates in a flat structure where ideas win on merit, not titles.

• Remote-First. We hire globally, prioritizing talent over location, so you can work where you're most productive. Prefer in-person? We have a hub in Barcelona with weekly co-working.