Founding Platform Engineer

About Straia

At Straia, we’re building the AI-native intelligence layer for colleges and universities.

Today, colleges run on dozens of disconnected systems, forcing staff to spend hundreds of hours manually reconciling data, compiling reports, and tracking down insights. Straia changes that. We unify institutional data and layer on AI agents that answer questions, generate insights/visualizations, and automate repetitive workflows, transforming how colleges operate.

Over time, Straia will evolve into the core intelligence layer for institutional operations, where every function, from student advising to admissions to budgeting and resource planning, is supported by collaborative AI agents that understand each institution’s unique data landscape.

We recently raised our pre-seed from a16z, Reach Capital, and JFF Ventures, and are now hiring a founding backend engineer to help build the technical backbone of how institutions interact with their data.

The Role

As a Founding Platform Engineer at Straia, you'll work directly with our CEO (Ryan), CTO (Alan) and CPO (Nikki) to build and scale the platform that powers AI-driven analytics for higher education.

This is a 0 1 opportunity to own the platform layer of a product that processes institutional data at scale, runs privately hosted frontier models, and delivers sub-second query responses to non-technical users making real decisions about student outcomes.

You'll also play a key role in building the internal AI-powered tooling and automations that make our small team operate like one ten times its size. We believe platform engineering isn't just about keeping systems running. It's about building the leverage that lets every engineer on the team ship faster, debug faster, and spend their time on problems that matter.

We're specifically looking for someone who consistently raises the bar. The kind of engineer whose default speed and judgment increase the velocity of everyone around them. If you thrive when expectations are high and the pace is fast, you'll feel right at home

## What You'll Do

• Architect the Core Data Layer — Design and scale our data layer to support sub-second queries across petabytes of compressed institutional data using DuckDB, Postgres, and GCS.
• Infrastructure as Code (and AI) — Own the technical mandate for our GCP environment. You’ll use Pulumi to build a self-healing, elastic infrastructure that scales as fast as our customer base.
• Optimize the Inference Loop — Own the deployment of state-of-the-art open-weightsmodels. You’ll tackle the hard problems: GPU orchestration, quantization, and minimizing latency to make our AI feel instantaneous.
• Productize DevEx — Build the "paved path" for the rest of the team. Your goal is to make shipping to production a non-event by building internal AI agents that automate code reviews, migration scripts, and log analysis.
• Engineer for Resilience — Beyond just uptime, you’ll build a system that is observableandelastic, ensuring Straia remains the "source of truth" for university leaders even under heavy analytical loads.
• Define the Standard — As a founding member, you aren't just following a roadmap; you are setting the engineering culture for how we handle data security, performance, and scale.

Who You Are

• Deep cloud expertise — 5+ years building and operating production systems, with strong experience in at least one major cloud provider (GCP strongly preferred).
• ML infrastructure experience — hands-on with model serving, MLOps, or inference optimization, ideally involving LLM deployment or GPU workloads.
• Data infrastructure background — experience with columnar query engines, large-scale data processing, or analytical databases.
• IaC and CI/CD fluency — Experienced with Terraform, Pulumi, or similar, and comfortable owning deployment pipelines end-to-end.
• Startup-minded — you thrive in ambiguity, take ownership by default, and know when to build for durability versus when to ship fast and iterate.
• Mission-driven — excited to improve education through technology that makes institutions smarter, faster, and more equitable.

Our Stack

• Cloud: GCP managed via Pulumi
• Data Layer: Postgres + DuckDB
• LLM Inference: Privately Hosted Frontier Model on GCP, plus API integrations with GPT, Gemini, and Claude
• Backend: Node.js + Express + TypeScript
• Frontend: React + Vite

Why Join Straia

• Be one of the first engineers at a venture-backed AI company redefining institutional intelligence in higher ed
• Own the platform layer end-to-end, from model serving to data pipelines to production reliability
• Build the internal AI tooling that makes a small team absurdly productive. If you've ever wanted the mandate to automate everything that slows engineers down, this is it.
• Work directly with top-tier investors and advisors from a16z, Reach, and JFF Ventures
• Join a small, fast-moving team that works incredibly hard, ships fast, and still makes time for good food, laughs, and adventures. We take our work seriously, but not ourselves
• Build meaningful technology that directly impacts student success and equity across colleges nationwide

What We Offer

• Compensation: $160K–$225K + equity
• Location: San Francisco (in office 4 days a week)
• Benefits: Health (platinum insurance), dental, and vision