Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

About the role

ABOUT BEACON AI

We’re a fast-moving team of aviators, engineers, and operators building an AI platform to make flying safer, more efficient, and more capable. Backed by top investors, we’ve secured a dozen Department of Defense contracts and partnered with major airlines to deliver mission-critical systems. We operate without silos or heavy processes. Small, focused teams own what they build, ship quickly, and learn fast, pushing the boundaries of how humans and AI work together in aviation.

ROLE OVERVIEW

We are seeking skilled Staff Software Engineers, Cloud Infrastructure to lead the buildout of our AWS foundation and our LLM platform. You will design, implement, and operate services that are scalable, reliable, and secure.

The broad scope means focus areas in LLM/ML Infra and IoT infra are strong bonus points. For ML Infra, build the stack that powers retrieval-augmented generation and application workflows built with frameworks like LangChain. Experience with IoT AWS services is a plus.

You will work closely with other engineers and product management. The ideal candidate is hands-on, comfortable with ambiguity, and excited to build from first principles.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Cloud Infrastructure Setup and Maintenance - Design, provision, and maintain AWS infrastructure using IaC tools such as AWS CDK or Terraform. - Build CI/CD and testing for apps, infra, and ML pipelines using GitHub Actions, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline. - Operate secure networking with VPCs, PrivateLink, and VPC endpoints. Manage IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, and audit logging.

- LLM Platform and Runtime - Stand up and operate model endpoints using AWS Bedrock and/or SageMaker; evaluate when to use ECS/EKS, Lambda, or Batch for inference jobs. - Build and maintain application services that call LLMs through clean APIs, with streaming, batching, and backoff strategies. - Implement prompt and tool execution flows with LangChain or similar, including agent tools and function calling.

- RAG Data Systems and Vector Search - Design chunking and embedding pipelines for documents, time series, and multimedia. Orchestrate with Step Functions or Airflow. - Operate vector search using OpenSearch Serverless, Aurora PostgreSQL with pgvector, or Pinecone. Tune recall, latency, and cost. - Build and maintain knowledge bases and data syncs from S3, Aurora, DynamoDB, and external sources.

- Evaluation, Observability, and Cost Governance - Create offline and online eval harnesses for prompts, retrievers, and chains. Track quality, latency, and regression risk. - Instrument model and app telemetry with CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry. Build token usage and cost dashboards with budgets and alerts. - Add guardrails, rate limits, fallbacks, and provider routing for resilience.

- Safety, Privacy, and Compliance - Implement PII detection and redaction, access controls, content filters, and human-in-the-loop review where needed. - Use Bedrock Guardrails or policy services to enforce safety standards. Maintain audit trails for regulated environments.