Platform Engineer

About the Company

Ema is building the next generation of AI technology to empower every employee in the enterprise to be their most creative and productive. Our proprietary tech allows enterprises to delegate most repetitive tasks to Ema, the AI employee. We are founded by ex-Google, Coinbase, and Okta executives and serial entrepreneurs, and backed by Accel Partners, Naspers, Section32, and prominent Silicon Valley angels including Sheryl Sandberg, Divesh Makan, Jerry Yang, Dustin Moskovitz, David Baszucki, and Gokul Rajaram. Our team comprises engineers from Google, Microsoft Research, Facebook, Square/Block, and Coinbase, educated at Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and the IITs. Ema is based in Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India. This is a hybrid role with three days a week in office.

About the Role

You are an experienced Platform Engineer who owns backend infrastructure end to end. You design multi-tenant, microservices-based systems that other engineering teams build on, and you make deliberate architectural tradeoffs around consistency, latency, scale, and cost. You are comfortable going deep — service mesh internals, database internals, distributed-systems failure modes — and equally comfortable defining the reliability and security contracts an enterprise AI platform depends on.

Responsibilities

• Design, own, and evolve scalable microservices architectures on Kubernetes across GCP, Azure, and AWS, including multi-tenant isolation (namespaces, network policies, per-tenant resource quotas and RBAC).
• Build core platform and data-plane components in Golang and Python — data ingestion, knowledge-base indexing and vector/graph search, application connectivity, workflow automation, and ML operations — against explicit latency and throughput SLOs.
• Own service-to-service communication: gRPC/protobuf API contracts, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), load balancing, retries, timeouts, and circuit breaking.
• Make and document architectural tradeoffs — partitioning/sharding strategy, consistency models (strong vs. eventual), caching tiers, and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Define the reliability contract: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, autoscaling (HPA/VPA/KEDA), and graceful degradation.
• Design and operate the observability stack — Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and real-time alerting — for full visibility into system health.
• Drive DevOps and platform-engineering practices: IaC (Terraform), Helm, GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Optimize for performance and cost — profiling, load testing, latency budgets, and cost-per-request.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response and root-cause analysis.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in Platform, Infrastructure, or Backend Engineering.
• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, operating systems, and networking.
• Proficiency in Golang and Python.
• Production experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and microservices architecture.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, Azure, or AWS); multi-cloud a strong plus.
• Strong database expertise: query and read/write-path optimization, partitioning/sharding, replication and consistency models, with practical experience in NoSQL and graph stores. Solid grasp of the CAP theorem and database internals.
• Solid distributed-systems foundation: idempotency, backpressure, delivery semantics (at-least-once vs. exactly-once), and message queues (Kafka/Pulsar/NATS/PubSub).
• Track record of building platforms from the ground up that other engineering teams successfully build on.

Preferred Skills

• Experience operating systems at high scale (high QPS, large data volumes).
• Depth in auth and security: secrets management (Vault), mTLS, RBAC, OIDC/SAML, network policy.
• Experience with vector databases (pgvector/Pinecone/Milvus) and graph databases (Neo4j/Neptune).
• Open-source contributions to infrastructure projects (e.g., Kubernetes operators).

Equal Opportunity Statement

Ema Unlimited is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or genetics.