Senior Platform Engineer

What we are building

We are building an applied research team in Marseille to work on a single, hard problem: can a software platform be genuinely autonomous — one where LLM agents orchestrate infrastructure, diagnose and repair failures, deploy new components, and compose interfaces, with no human in the loop for routine operations!

We are researching and engineering the foundations with minimal dependencies.

The role

We are looking for someone who has been on both sides of the stack long enough to stop thinking in layers. Someone who has designed distributed backends and built interfaces that expose them, who can read an architecture diagram and immediately see what will break under load, and who writes code that a colleague six months later can read and understand without a meeting.

This person will sit at the intersection of all platform concerns — backend runtime, distributed systems, devops, data, system integration, UI and agent systems — and will be the ones who notice when a decision made on one side creates an invisible problem on the other: Part architect, part implementer, always a clear thinker.

What you will own

Platform architecture

• Define and document architectural decisions with long-term tradeoff visibility
• Design the contracts between agent runtime, control plane, UI layer, and deployment pipeline
• Identify failure modes before they become incidents
• Keep the system comprehensible as it grows

Backend and distributed systems

• Distributed agent kernel: process supervision, cluster routing, atomic state management
• Systems-level code for low-latency, high-reliability operations
• Zero-trust component marketplace & sandboxed execution
• Observability: distributed tracing, causal analysis, anomaly detection automation

Skills

Technical breadth

• Distributed systems in production — you have operated clusters under real failure and learned from it
• Systems programming — memory model, concurrency primitives, performance-critical code paths
• Frontend architecture — component models, reactivity, rendering pipelines, state management at scale
• API design — you have versioned, evolved, and deprecated contracts without breaking consumers
• Security — zero-trust networking, cryptographic guarantees
• Container orchestration — declarative deployments, progressive delivery, multi-cluster

Thinking and craft

• You can articulate an architecture to a non-technical stakeholder and to a compiler in the same afternoon
• Your code is concise and documented in way someone can actually read it
• You have worked across enough paradigms — functional, actor-model, reactive, imperative — to choose deliberately
• You raise problems early and propose solutions at the same time
• You are comfortable being the person in the room who says "this will not work" and explaining why

Signals we look for

• Experience across meaningfully different programming paradigms or runtime models, not variations of the same stack
• One project where you were wrong about an architectural decision and had to live with the consequences
• Code you wrote three years ago that still runs in production and that you are neither embarrassed nor precious about

We are not looking for

• Someone who equates seniority with avoiding implementation work
• Someone who needs the architecture fully specified before they can write the first line
• A person who does not communicate or communicates in jargon
• A person who does not remember their projects from 3, 5 or 10 years ago

Practical details

• Location Marseille, France
• Contract Consulting leading to full time
• Hybrid / on-site
• Seniority 10+ years - MsC and above