Where I do my best work

I am a senior platform engineer, more than ten years in. Platform engineer is the clearest-signal title. DevOps is the honest fallback. Actual authority and scope matter more than title prestige.

• Systems integration Across cloud, observability, and developer tooling.
• Developer experience Internal platforms and developer tooling as the actual product of the role. Tooling sold to external customers counts just as strongly as tooling built for a team down the hall.
• Agent-first infrastructure Agentic coding and developer tools, MCP and tool interfaces, orchestration, evaluation, observability, safety, and debugging for agent consumers. Internal developer platforms where agents are first-class users alongside humans belong here too.
• Production platforms Reliability, incident response, rollout boundaries, and long-term operability.
• Platform-team interfaces Cross-organization work that makes ownership and handoffs explicit.
• Bounded delivery Contract-shaped and embedded missions with real customer problems, explicit handoffs, and periodic resets. Modernization work, platform control planes, and agentic operations all land here.
• Meaningful ownership Broad platform territory. Owning wide ground while a company is still forming is the strongest version of this, and a first-platform-hire charter at an established company is a close second.

Role shape

Senior is a good fit. Staff or Lead fits when the charter supports real authority across a platform or developer-tooling surface. Staff is not automatically better than Senior, and a Senior role with real authority is not a lesser outcome. What I read is the actual scope, not the title tier.

• A strong platform charter with some SRE or product responsibility can fit well.
• Primarily SRE, operations, or infrastructure maintenance is less aligned.
• Backend-product work as the actual role is a hard no.
• Generic AI branding does not add much unless agentic developer leverage is part of the work.

Practical fit

• Location and arrangement I am based in the East Bay and I am not relocating. The strongest arrangement is a company that is structurally remote, with no offices anywhere. A real Bay Area office, or a comfortable Bay Area hybrid, works just as well. Hard stop: a company with US offices, none of them in the Bay Area. A Bay Area satellite of a company headquartered elsewhere is fine, and so is a company whose only offices are overseas.
• Office cadence Up to about three days a week in a Bay Area office works well. Four days is workable, but it carries a real cost from the East Bay and will slow my answer while I weigh it against other options. Five days onsite is a hard stop, however strong the rest of the role is. Tell me the expected cadence early, since it is the fact most likely to end a conversation that otherwise looked good.
• Employment Full-time is the default. Direct independent contracting through my own business, consultancy work, and embedded delivery can fit. Staffing-agency W-2 contracts, contract-to-hire, and agency-mediated C2C are not a fit.
• Compensation My base-compensation floor depends on the sector: $170K for nonprofit and government work, $200K for everyone else. $250K is the top of my range. Compensation is not load-bearing above the floor.
• Working environment Manager quality, autonomy, team composition, communication style, on-call expectations, overtime, and room to work without masking all matter. This carries more weight for me than compensation, title, or stack. A strong team can make an otherwise ordinary role the best one on my list.
• Representation and inclusion I look at leadership representation, engineering-team composition, and the direction a company's public commitments are heading. A company walking its commitments back is a mark against it, not a neutral fact.
• Technical environment Exact stack matching matters less to me than the shape of the problem. My resume is the only source for what I actually claim.
• Values Some product directions and verticals are a flat no for me, regardless of how strong the rest of the role is. A technically excellent role can still be the wrong role.

Company stage and stability

Early and small companies are firmly in scope. Credible traction beats late-stage funding, and real users in production tell me more than the size of a round.

I do look at runway, revenue, and layoff history before I spend a hiring loop's worth of time. Not as a filter against small companies, but because several of my roles ended for structural reasons and I would like the next one to last.

Useful context before a first conversation

A useful first message includes:

• The name of the company
• Office location and expected cadence
• Base-compensation band
• The actual role charter and ownership boundaries
• Manager and team shape
• On-call and overtime expectations
• Technical environment, product, and customer
• Company stage and interview format
• Why my experience is specifically relevant

Name the company. A pitch that withholds it is the one most likely to expire in my inbox, because I cannot evaluate a role I cannot look up. Direct contact from a founder, hiring manager, or in-house recruiter gets a faster and warmer reply from me than agency-mediated outreach does.