Platform Engineer
About Us
Guardify helps criminal justice ecosystems with technology that accelerates justice and healing for survivors of crime. We are a mission-driven, rapidly growing startup and a sustainable social enterprise. We got our start working with Child Advocacy Centers to protect sensitive child forensic interview evidence. Today we offer a cloud-based platform for digital evidence management, case management, and capture, giving our customers one place to secure evidence, run cases, and record what matters. We are driven by a passion for leveraging technology to improve the public sector and by our commitment to the ethical use of AI, advanced video technologies, privacy, security, and social impact. Join us to do meaningful work: protect vulnerable populations, advance how justice and advocacy work gets done, and be part of a team that puts customers and the communities they serve first. About the Role As a Platform Engineer, you will own the foundation Guardify runs on: our cloud infrastructure, how code gets to production, how we know when something is wrong, and how we keep our customers’ data secure. That covers Cases, Evidence, and Capture. This is a hands-on role. You write the infrastructure, fix the pipeline, tune the alarm, and work the incident. You also set the standard for how the team builds, ships, and operates software, and you are accountable for the numbers that show whether the platform is healthy. Our customers trust us with some of the most sensitive records there are: forensic interviews, case files, and evidence used in prosecution. Security and reliability are not a phase of the work here. They are the work. You are the engineering owner of our security and compliance posture, and the person our compliance and security officers turn to when an auditor or penetration tester needs an answer. You are not only an infrastructure engineer. When the problem is in application code, you read it, debug it, and fix it. When it belongs on the roadmap, you bring it to the team with the evidence behind it. You work alongside product managers, engineers, and our customer operations team. This is an individual contributor role with a path to leading platform work as the team grows.
Key Responsibilities
Infrastructure
- Own our cloud infrastructure end to end: how it is defined in code, how it scales, and how it is secured.
- Keep environments consistent and reproducible, so what works in development works in production.
- Keep the cost of running the platform in check as we grow, and know where every dollar of it goes.
Delivery
- Make shipping safe and routine: fast checks on every change, gated releases, and a clear way back when something goes wrong.
- Remove the friction that slows the team down between a finished change and a running one.
Reliability and observability
- Build monitoring the team can act on, so the right person learns about a problem before a customer does.
- Lead incidents to resolution, and make sure the same incident does not happen twice.
- Keep our video and media processing fast and reliable as volume grows.
Security and compliance
- Own the engineering side of our compliance program. Partner with our compliance and security officers through HIPAA, CJIS, SOC 2, and ISO 42001, and be accountable for the technical controls, evidence, and remediation each one requires.
- Lead security work for a platform that holds highly sensitive records: access control, encryption, audit trails, and dependency and secret hygiene.
- Own our annual penetration tests, from scoping through remediation and retest.
- Make the secure way the easy way for the rest of the engineering team.
Migrations
- Help move customers onto our current platform from older and acquired systems, without losing or exposing anything along the way.
- Build the checks that prove a migration is complete, not just finished running.
Standards and documentation
- Write the runbooks, decisions, and docs the team operates from, and keep them current.
- Build the tooling and automation that let a small team run a growing platform.
How We Will Measure This Role
- Delivery: how often we ship to production, how long a change takes to get there, and how often a release has to be rolled back.
- Reliability: uptime, time to detect and time to restore, and the share of problems we find before a customer reports them.
- Signal quality: alarms that lead to action, and alarms that do not.
- Security and compliance: audits completed without findings in engineering-owned controls, and time to close findings from scans, penetration tests, and audits.
- Cost: cost to serve per customer as we grow.
Several of these are not measured today. Setting the baseline is part of your first 30 days.
A Note on Fit We are a lean team. We value momentum over ceremony, clarity over process for its own sake, and real-world impact over perfect plans. This role is for someone who wants to own the platform and stay close to the code that runs on it. It is not a great fit if you would rather work only on infrastructure and never touch application code, or would rather have a dedicated operations team behind you. Unsure if you meet every qualification but excited about the role? We hire based on impact, curiosity, and a passion for building products that serve people and communities. If Guardify sounds like the place for you, we encourage you to apply. Our Vibe: Mission, Vision, & Values Guardify builds a culture of trust by being incredibly intentional about its vision, mission, values, behaviors, and the experiences we deliver. Our vision is to connect communities to digital evidence management solutions through our mission to create digital evidence management solutions enabling seamless access to, organization, and utilization of digital evidence for justice, security, and a path to restoration.
Things we value and use to make decisions:
- Our Customers and the Communities we/they serve; come first.
- We are Excellent to One Another.
- We’re committed to building a profitable enterprise that has life-changing social impact.
- We Create Intentional Experiences.
- We Don’t Get to Do Today Again.
Salary and Benefits Compensation for this role will be based on experience, scope, and level of accountability. In addition to compensation, Guardify offers benefits and flexibility consistent with a mission-driven, remote-friendly team.
Qualifications
- 5+ years in platform, infrastructure, DevOps, site reliability, or backend engineering with production ownership.
- You have owned production systems in the cloud, including being responsible when they broke, and can point to what you changed afterward.
- You have defined infrastructure in code and built or rebuilt a deployment pipeline.
- You are comfortable in application code. You can read, debug, and fix the services you run.
- Experience running relational databases in production: performance, migrations, and operations.
- Security instincts. You treat access, encryption, and auditability as part of the design, not a review at the end.
- You have been the engineering owner through compliance audits (such as SOC 2, HIPAA, CJIS, or ISO) and penetration tests, and can walk us through what you remediated.
- You pick up new tools quickly, including AI tools, and use them to get more done while still understanding what you ship.
- You write clearly, and you stay steady when production is down and people are waiting on you.
- Mission-driven. You want your work to matter for the communities we serve.
Nice to Have
- Experience in a regulated or security-sensitive environment: justice, govtech, public sector, healthcare, or finance.
- Experience with video or media processing at scale.
- Experience leading a large data migration with sensitive records.
- Experience supporting software that runs alongside hardware, such as recording equipment or connected devices.