Senior Software Engineer – Enterprise AI Contract | Palo Alto, CA (Hybrid) | Global Infrastructure & Platform
About Our Client
Our client is a leading cybersecurity company specializing in data protection and cloud security, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with a global footprint that includes offices in Bangalore, India and beyond. Founded over a decade ago, the company has built a reputation for helping enterprises safeguard their data against ransomware, breaches, and operational disruptions through an innovative, cloud-native platform. Their solutions serve a broad range of industries — from financial services to healthcare — and their mission centers on building a world where businesses are resilient against cyber threats. They are a growth-stage, publicly traded company known for a culture of engineering excellence, high autonomy, and meaningful impact.
Job Description
The Enterprise AI team is the company''s internal AI enablement engine — evaluating where AI can drive real operational value, building the platforms and patterns that make adoption seamless, and helping engineering teams across the organization work smarter and faster. This team operates at the intersection of applied AI, distributed systems, and enterprise operations, and this role sits at the center of it all.
As a Senior Software Engineer (Contract), you''ll own the design, development, and operation of core backend and platform infrastructure — from Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native services to APIs and developer tooling. You''ll partner closely with Product, AI, and Security teams to align architecture with business objectives, drive engineering excellence through code quality and CI/CD best practices, and serve as a mentor and multiplier for the broader engineering organization.
This is a high-ownership, high-impact contract role where you''ll write production code, lead design reviews, and have a direct hand in shaping the systems that power the company at scale. If you thrive in fast-moving environments, love building platforms that others depend on, and want your work to matter — this is the role.
Duties & Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end delivery of major platform initiatives, from design through deployment and post-launch success.
- Manage Kubernetes at depth — clusters, networking, operators, container lifecycle, and multi-tenant orchestration.
- Design, develop, and optimize distributed services and cloud-native infrastructure on AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform for scale, reliability, and performance.
- Drive engineering excellence through code quality standards, design reviews, automation, and CI/CD best practices.
- Collaborate across Product, AI, and Security teams to ensure architecture aligns with business objectives.
- Mentor engineers through architecture decisions, trade-offs, and delivery challenges.
- Partner with leadership to align engineering strategy with product objectives and the technical roadmap.
Required Experience & Skills
- 6+ years of software engineering experience with a deep backend and infrastructure focus.
- Strong production programming skills in Python and/or Go — you ship code, not just scripts and configs.
- Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience building and operating clusters (not just deploying to them).
- Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems in production environments.
- Cloud-native fluency across AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform — compute, storage, IAM, networking, and managed services.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Familiarity with applied AI tooling and agentic AI frameworks (e.g., Claude, LiteLLM, AI gateways) and the ability to build backend services that integrate with them.
- Strong system design and architectural judgment.
- Clear communicator who partners well across product, security, and AI teams.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with observability stacks — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry.
- Multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure experience (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, on-prem).
- Familiarity with API gateways, AI gateways, and policy/authorization frameworks (ABAC, OPA).
- Service mesh or platform-as-a-service design experience.
- Track record of improving engineering productivity at scale.
Education
Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field preferred. Equivalent professional experience will be considered.
Pay
W2 Contract | $75/hr
Ready to build AI-powered infrastructure at scale? Apply now — our team moves fast.
Kubernetes | Python | Go | AWS | Google Cloud Platform | Distributed Systems | Cloud-Native | CI/CD | Infrastructure as Code | Terraform | Enterprise AI | Backend Engineering | Agentic AI
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