Platform Engineer at Harper
San Francisco, CA
$140,000–$280,000
Jul 23, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A platform/infrastructure engineering role at an AI-driven commercial insurance company, responsible for the foundational systems that the rest of engineering builds on. Day-to-day work spans databases, AWS, networking, CI/CD, observability, and orchestrating large numbers of parallel AI agent workloads. The role suits engineers who have owned production systems end-to-end, are comfortable on-call, and derive satisfaction from multiplying the output of other engineers through tooling and reliable infrastructure.
Senior level · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $140,000–$280,000
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 820 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 610–1,050
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting says 'hiring platform engineers across all levels, which we determine during the interview process' — no explicit seniority is advertised in the title or framing, so the title states no level. The scope (owning production systems end-to-end, on-call ownership, designing for scale, working directly with founders) supports a Senior classification.
Python, TypeScript, and Go are listed together as 'proficiency in Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar' — these are interchangeable options for the same requirement; Python is listed as primary with TypeScript and Go as alternatives.
The role clearly BUILDS infrastructure and tooling (CI/CD systems, observability platforms, connection pooling layers, eval infrastructure) rather than merely operating existing systems, which is why 15-1252 Software Developers is preferred over 15-1244. The runner-up 15-1244 is noted given the heavy infrastructure/SRE framing.
Cursor and Claude Code appear in the 'You Might Be a Fit If' narrative section (not a hard-requirements block) as examples of AI coding tools the candidate should be comfortable using — listed as preferred accordingly.
Railway appears only in the team context narrative ('Harper runs 200+ services across Railway and AWS') as a stack detail, not as a gated requirement.
Deep AWS sub-services (ECS, Lambda, RDS, VPC design) are explicitly listed under the 'Nice to Have' section.
No minimum years of experience are stated numerically at the role level; the JD defers level determination to the interview process.
Read the full posting
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