Senior Platform Engineer, Infrastructure & AI

Blackbird Labs is a loyalty and payments platform establishing meaningful connections between the world’s best restaurants and their customers.

Served up in 2022 by Ben Leventhal, co-founder of Eater and Resy, Blackbird offers a fully customizable loyalty programming platform for restaurants and a consumer app designed to make every guest feel like a bonafide VIP no matter where they dine. Backed by Union Square Ventures, a16z, Amex Ventures, Variant Fund, and other forward-thinking investors, Blackbird is out to revolutionize the restaurant industry.

At Blackbird, our values guide everything we do and our talent principles define the key traits we seek in our employees.

We have passion for our product – committed to our mission and instinctively think like and go the extra mile for our customers. We are elite performers – striving for excellence, going above and beyond to achieve exceptional results, and learning quickly with horsepower, drive, and grit. We make others better – taking initiative to elevate others, giving and receiving feedback, and championing a culture of growth. We hold one another accountable to living out our talent principles as we march together to achieving our mission.

Blackbird is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own the platforms and tooling that make our engineering team fast, reliable, and AI-augmented. You'll be responsible for the infrastructure powering APIs that handle payments, loyalty, and blockchain transactions for thousands of restaurants, as well as the developer experience layer that helps our engineers ship with confidence every day.

This is a high-leverage role. You'll own our AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, observability stack, and the emerging AI-assisted development workflows that are becoming core to how we build software. You'll act as both a technical owner and a multiplier: shipping platforms that keep production humming while accelerating the velocity of every engineer on the team.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our AWS infrastructure (Terraform)

• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines

• Drive observability across the platform, keeping systems performant where it matters most

• Build and expand AI-assisted developer workflows; you'll own this surface area

• Remove friction from shipping: local dev environments, Gradle optimization, build caching, and whatever else is slowing us down

• Push for the right technical investments at the right time; we're moving fast and the landscape keeps changing

Requirements

• 5+ years building and operating production systems on AWS

• Strong Terraform proficiency

• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (ECS Fargate or similar), CI/CD design, and deployment automation

• Comfortable in the JVM ecosystem: Spring Boot, Gradle, JVM tuning; Kotlin expertise not required

• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL operations and performance

• Experience with observability tooling (Datadog, CloudWatch, PagerDuty, or equivalent)

• Python or Bash for scripting and automation

• High ownership instincts; this is a small team, scope is fluid, and production will occasionally need your attention

Nice to Haves

• You actively use AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) and have opinions about what actually works

• Experience with blockchain infrastructure, web3 systems, or HashiCorp Vault

• Background building developer platforms or internal tooling other engineers rely on daily

Depending on your work location and experience the target annual salary for this position can range from: $180,000-$220,000 USD. Disclosure in accordance with New York City's Pay Transparency Law.

Full time offers from Blackbird may also include stock options, benefits (including medical, dental, vision, flexible time off, 401(k)), and some not-so-standard, extra-fun perks — subject to applicable taxes and based on eligibility.

Blackbird Labs is committed to diversity in its workforce and is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Blackbird will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. For US applicants, you may view the Know Your Rights notice here. Additionally, Blackbird participates in the E-Verify program.

Join us and find out what the best work of your career could look like here at Blackbird.