About Playlab

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI.

We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators & students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab – and the impact is growing every day.

At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material - one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you’ll join us.

The Role

Playlab seeks a Principal Platform Engineer to join our growing Engineering team. As a Principal Platform Engineer, you’ll be architecting systems that help us scale what works and makes it possible to continuously experiment quickly with brand new ideas at the edges of what these technologies can do.

Examples of the work

• Architect new agent runtime infrastructure that will support us scaling to the next 100x users

• Implement the foundations of multi-person apps and realtime collaboration features

• Design systems that support lab schools redesigning education from the ground up - from AI-native curricula to entirely new operational models

• Collaborate with the ML team to select and build data infrastructure that can power realtime steering of LLM interactions

• Work with product and app engineering to create secure, ephemeral backend sandboxes that enable power users to add sophisticated custom functionality to the apps they’re creating on Playlab

• Contribute to open sourcing components of our platform and supporting country-specific and self-hosted deployments

• And more…

Expectations

• Research, make tradeoffs, design and implement the core systems that enable us to rapidly iterate on AI-native educational experiences

• Help design the engineering culture and technical strategy

• Stay on top of new technologies, platforms and techniques to unlock new functionality and improve existing features

• Work cross functionally and with customers so your system designs support the real needs of users as well as engineering goals

• Balance experimentation with production excellence - be quick and creative when exploring new possibilities, ensure reliability, observability, and maintainability when productionizing systems

• Take security and privacy seriously and work it into your architectural decisions

• Work with product and engineering to both set and support the roadmap

• Mentor engineers on system design and platform engineering through pairing and reviews

Qualifications

• 10+ years architecting and building scalable software systems

• Strong experience designing and deploying production systems on Kubernetes and AWS, ideally with Terraform

• Strong experience implementing observability, monitoring, and redundancy for critical systems

• Proficient in Python or TypeScript (ideally both)

• Experience with security and privacy considerations when designing multi-tenant infrastructure processing sensitive data

• Thrive in high-agency, high collaboration cultures

• Great communication that makes working remote-first work

Bonus Points For...

• Experience designing AI infrastructure

• Experience with designing creative platforms

• Experience in education or building in edtech

Technologies

• Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Typescript (Remix/React, Node), Python, Postgres, Neo4J, Vector Databases, Airflow

Compensation Range: $190K - $230K