Staff Platform Engineer

Our mission: to make it easy for anyone to make beautiful presentations, in minutes.

About Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai is changing the way the world presents by building fast, foolproof tools that enable anyone to tell visual stories that win. The Beautiful.ai team is a playful, driven, and passionate group of pet-lovers, video-gamers, and pickleball enthusiasts. With a globally-distributed remote team and a San Francisco-based office, we find unique opportunities to get to know each other personally, while delivering on our goals. Data-driven decision making and an outcomes-focused mindset are core to our way of working.

Today, Beautiful.ai equips 100,000+ happy paying customers, from start-ups to multinational Fortune 500 corporations, with a leading presentation software solution. Companies like SAP, HP, Rakuten, LIV Golf and more trust Beautiful.ai to tell their stories. We are a Series B company and have raised capital from prominent investors including Shasta Ventures, Trinity Ventures and First Round Capital and are led by our CTO/Founder, Mitch Grasso, who is a second-time founder in the presentation space.

About the role

As a Staff Platform Engineer, you’ll take a leadership role in shaping the platform’s architecture and scaling infrastructure to meet the growing needs of the business. You will drive key initiatives in automation, security, observability, and incident management, while mentoring senior engineers, setting best practices, and influencing the long-term technical direction of the platform.

What you'll be doing

• This is a hands-on role! You will be writing code and building systems as a major part of your day-to-day work.
• Take full ownership of the platform's cloud infrastructure, architecting and optimizing large-scale systems to ensure high availability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency across multiple cloud providers.
• Lead the design and implementation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) at scale, driving best practices and innovations in automation to improve infrastructure provisioning and management.
• Own the strategy for CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that they scale and adapt to our growing needs while optimizing for speed, reliability, and performance.
• Lead incident response efforts, define disaster recovery strategies, and ensure that the platform is resilient to failures by creating robust systems for uptime and reliability.
• Define and implement observability standards for logging, monitoring, and alerting, ensuring visibility into platform health and performance, and enabling rapid detection of issues.
• Contribute to security best practices in infrastructure and platform services, ensuring the system adheres to industry security standards.
• Mentor and lead engineering teams, guiding senior engineers, setting technical direction, and providing leadership on complex projects. Play a key role in developing the team’s technical capabilities.
• Work cross-functionally with leadership and other teams to define long-term technical roadmaps, contributing to business objectives by aligning platform engineering work with company strategy.
• Champion thought leadership in platform engineering by staying at the forefront of industry trends, evaluating emerging technologies, and sharing insights through internal talks, documentation, and community engagement.

What we expect from you

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). A Master’s degree is a plus.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience in Software Engineering, with a backend or platform focus.
• Strong hands-on experience with GCP is preferred, but proficiency with any major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure) is acceptable.
• Proven track record of driving complex technical initiatives from planning through execution to successful completion.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to evaluate system performance, troubleshoot issues, and apply data-driven thinking to engineering decisions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Ability to take on a role of a thought leader for the team and influence technical decisions throughout the organization.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with organizational leadership to help shape engineering strategy, influence resourcing decisions, and contribute to effective team design.
• Bay Area candidates preferred, or open to occasional travel as needed.

Our tech stack

Client Side: React, Webpack, vanilla Typescript/Javascript for SVG layout, rendering, and styling
Server Side: Node.js with Express for API and server side rendering, various distributed node.js microservices
Infrastructure on Google Cloud: App Engine, Firebase, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Stackdriver, Storage

Benefits:

• Flexible vacation policy and a fully remote work policy
• 100% Medical/Dental/Vision insurance covered for the employee / 60%-65% covered for dependents
• Comprehensive 401K program
• FSA and Commuter Benefits
• Competitive Equity with a 4 year vesting schedule
• Life / AD&D and Disability Coverage
• Parental leave for birthing or non-birthing parents