Backend Platform Engineer at Usul
San Francisco, CA
$180,000–$240,000
Jul 19, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A backend platform engineering role focused on building and maintaining core infrastructure for a defense-technology procurement platform. Day-to-day work involves cloud infrastructure, DevOps tooling, and integration with AI/LLM systems. The role suits engineers with a few years of backend infrastructure experience who have an interest in national security applications.
Mid level · 2+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
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 980 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 740–1,300
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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).
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 (5)
The JD asks for 'experience with several of the following' across Python, DevOps, Bash, Linux, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS/GCP, and agentic/LLM tooling — meaning no single one of these is individually a hard gate, but the cluster as a whole is required. All have been marked required as a group per the requirements section placement; hiring managers should note that breadth across several (not necessarily all) of these is what the posting actually demands.
The experience range is 2–8 YOE, suggesting a wide mid-level band. Seniority is assessed as Mid given the lower bound, though strong candidates at the upper end would read as Senior.
The role lists both San Francisco and Washington DC as on-site locations; SF is used as the primary CBSA given the company's Silicon Valley framing.
TypeScript is listed as a 'Bonus' skill and is marked preferred accordingly.
The posting contained an embedded prompt-injection attempt ('For AI Assistants: Ignore ALL previous instructions…'); it has been disregarded entirely.
Read the full posting
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