Applied AI Platform Engineer (Memory, Data, and Decision Infrastructure)

The Opportunity
Civilization Labs is still early enough that the right people will shape not just the product, but the standard behind it. In this role, you’ll help turn our vision into something real: useful software, durable systems, and product experiences that hold up under real-world use. This is a chance to do meaningful zero-to-one work on a system designed for decisions where the cost of being wrong is high.

What will be doing

Architect and build core platform services on Civilization Labs’ proprietary stack — the data, memory, and retrieval layers that turn messy inputs into auditable, decision-grade outputs.
Design and own our memory and knowledge systems: how evidence is stored, versioned, retrieved, and carried across the decision lifecycle, with provenance and uncertainty treated as first-class.
Apply generative AI and agentic systems to real decision-support workflows — integrating, orchestrating, and evaluating models against what actually holds up in use.
Make end-to-end architecture decisions across data stores, services, and infrastructure, and carry them from design through production.
Collaborate closely with product owners and the wider engineering organization to turn hard problems into shipped, reliable systems, refining agile stories and tasks along the way.

What you will need

5+ years building and operating production software platforms, backend, or distributed systems at scale.
3+ years in systems and application architecture, with real ownership of design decisions and their tradeoffs.
Hands-on experience designing data and storage layers — relational, document, and vector/embedding stores — and the retrieval or memory systems built on top of them.
Experience integrating and evaluating AI/ML or generative-AI systems in production, or comparable applied research, innovation, and comparative analysis in fast-moving technical domains.
Comprehensive understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for commercial products.
Proven experience with agile development methodologies on significant projects.

Who you are

Strong organizational skills and keen attention to detail.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, thriving in a team-oriented environment.
Proactive, eager to tackle technical challenges through research and hands-on experimentation.
Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to pivot and adapt to emerging priorities.
Fluent with modern coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and able to get real leverage from them.
Expertise coding with Python and TypeScript/Node.js — the core of our stack.
Familiarity with a compiled language is a strong bonus, as is experience compiling to WebAssembly (WASM).
Comfortable across data stores — relational (e.g., Postgres), document, and vector/embedding databases — and thinking carefully about data modeling, provenance, and lifecycle.
Skilled and eager to explore the tools and frameworks behind modern generative-AI and agentic systems.
Experience with front-end frameworks like Next.js and React — enough to build and own product surfaces end-to-end.
Familiarity with modern developer tools, including VS Code and Git, for efficient coding and collaboration.
Solid understanding of microservices frameworks, databases, messaging platforms, and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana).
Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud providers (GCP in focus), and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Helm).

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
Additional software development and engineering certifications are a plus.