Senior / Staff Platform Engineer

About Hedra:

Hedra is a pioneering generative media company backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building Hedra Studio, a multimodal creation platform capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

At the core of Hedra Studio is our Character-3 foundation model, the first omnimodal model in production. Character-3 jointly reasons across image, text, and audio for more intelligent video generation — it’s the next evolution of AI-driven content creation.

Note: At Hedra, we’re a team of hard-working, passionate individuals seeking to fundamentally change content and build a generational company together. You should have start-up experience and be a self-starter that is driven to build impactful products that change the status quo. The Hedra team is fully in-person in SF/NY with a shared love of solving hard problems using whiteboards.

Summary:

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will design and build the internal developer platform that empowers our engineering teams to deploy, scale, and manage our transformative AI-powered products efficiently. You will create self-service infrastructure tooling, abstract away complexity from developers, and build the foundational platform capabilities that enable rapid innovation on our Character-3 foundation model.
You will architect developer-friendly APIs and interfaces for infrastructure resources, build automated provisioning workflows using Terraform, and create standardized deployment patterns on Kubernetes. Your work will focus on enabling engineering teams to ship faster while maintaining reliability, security, and cost efficiency. You'll design platform services that abstract the underlying complexity of our multi-modal AI workloads and video processing infrastructure.
You will partner with product engineers and researchers to understand their needs and translate them into scalable platform solutions. We're looking for a full-time hire in our San Francisco office.

Experience:

• At least 4+ years of experience building developer platforms, internal tooling, or platform engineering at technology companies

• Platform API design and building internal developer tooling, CLIs, and self-service portals for infrastructure resources

• Kubernetes platform expertise including building abstractions, operators, custom resources, and developer-friendly deployment workflows

• Infrastructure as Code mastery with Terraform for creating reusable modules and standardized infrastructure patterns

• Developer experience focus with experience building internal platforms that reduce cognitive load for engineering teams

• Container platform design including image registries, security scanning, and standardized base images for AI/ML workloads

• Service templating and standardization using tools like Helm, Kustomize, or custom controllers for consistent deployments

• Platform observability implementing centralized logging, metrics, and tracing that developers can easily consume

• Self-service automation building workflows that allow teams to provision resources without platform team intervention

• Cost transparency and governance implementing resource quotas, cost allocation, and usage visibility across teams

• Security by default designing platform services with built-in security controls, secrets management, and compliance guardrails

• Multi-tenancy and isolation ensuring teams can work independently while sharing platform resources safely

• Startup Experience is a must — we work hard and build quickly. Ideal candidates should be passionate with an always-on attitude that drives them to live and breathe the product (not a \"punch the clock\" disposition)

• Developer advocacy mindset with experience gathering requirements from engineering teams and translating them into platform capabilities

• Scalable platform architecture for supporting rapid team growth and varying workload demands

Personality:

• Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for infrastructure projects and deliver on them. Have an opinion and the experience to backup that opinion.

• Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills.

• Understand platform economics and developer productivity short and long term, with a focus on building tools that accelerate engineering velocity.

• Mission-driven — we are building something fundamentally disruptive and this reflects deeply in our company DNA.

• And most importantly, treat Hedra as your own and help shape the technical vision accordingly

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation and equity.

• 401k.

• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental).

• Lunch and snacks at the office

We encourage you to apply even if you don't fully meet all the listed requirements; we value potential and diverse perspectives, and your unique skills could be a great asset to our team.