Hamilton AI is a New York City-based company that provides a workflow and execution platform for private aviation.
THIS ROLE IS INFRASTRUCTURE-FIRST, WITH A SECOND GEAR IN BACKEND OR QA. Hamilton is building the operating system for charter aviation. Quoting, trip planning, live operations, payments, safety-critical data, and sensitive customer information. The software that runs aviation operations doesn't get to be "mostly working." When our systems ship, they need to be correct, observable, and resilient. That's your job. We're hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer infra and internal platforms that let Hamilton's engineering team ship fast without breaking things that matter. Your primary skillset is infrastructure: CI/CD, deployment systems, runtime environments, observability, and developer tooling. Your secondary skillset and the thing that makes you dangerous is depth in either backend engineering or quality engineering. You don't need both. You need one, and you need it to be real. Now is a pivotal time in how software gets built. AI-accelerated development is not a buzzword here, it's how we operate. Our engineers ship with AI coding agents, and the platform layer is what makes that safe. You will build the CI/CD pipelines, quality gates, automated verification loops, and deployment guardrails that let a small team move at a speed that shouldn't be possible. The better your platform, the more leverage AI gives us. This is how we compound. WHAT WINNING LOOKS LIKE IN THIS ROLE Your first job is to own infrastructure. You will architect and operate Hamilton's CI/CD pipelines, build systems, deployment workflows, and runtime environments. You'll build the abstractions that standardize how services are built, tested, deployed, and observed. Release infrastructure, rollback strategies, production validation. These are yours to own. Your second job is to make AI-accelerated development safe and fast. As AI agents produce more of our code, the platform becomes the immune system. You'll build the automated verification loops, quality signals, and guardrails that let us trust agent-generated output at production scale. You'll shape how we integrate AI tooling into our development workflow, not as an experiment, but as core infrastructure. Your third job depends on your secondary skillset. If your background is backend: you'll partner deeply on API design, service architecture, and infrastructure patterns that scale with complexity. If your background is QA: you'll build the automation frameworks, testing infrastructure, and release-blocking quality gates that become core platform. Finally, you will shape the long-term platform roadmap aligned with enterprise and regulatory requirements in aviation. A domain where rigor is non-negotiable and your platform decisions scale across the entire company. THE CONTEXT ("WHY HAMILTON, WHY NOW?") Charter aviation is a $30B+ market running on phone calls, spreadsheets, and legacy systems stitched-together. This is a 24/7 industry where brokers, operators, and crews are constantly on call. A single trip touches pricing logic, aircraft availability, crew scheduling, regulatory compliance, payment processing, real-time operational data, and the list goes on. When something breaks, someone either loses sleep or the entire business loses trust and revenue. There’s no single platform that solves all these. Teams Frankenstein together tools that were never designed for private aviation. Spreadsheets for quoting, WhatsApp threads for comms, Quickbooks duct-taped to Stripe for payments, and disconnected scheduling software to run aircraft ops. The amount of context-dependent workflows and manual reconciliation creates operational risk. We’re replacing all of it with a vertically integrated system, and soon, a modern banking layer that’s built specifically for how the industry actually runs. Our customers manage safety-critical workflows and sensitive PII. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work here. Move fast and break nothing does. We’re at an inflection point nearing our Series A. We have a small and senior team, using AI-accelerated workflows to punch above our weight. We’ve built a strong foundation by deploying containerized services, typed APIs, and a pattern-driven codebase. But we need someone to take full ownership of the platform layer. Someone who can take what exists, make it better, and continue building as we scale. If you want a place where your infra decisions are felt across the entire company, and you can see the direct impact of your work, this is it! WHO THRIVES IN THIS ROLE You've probably been the person other engineers go to when the build is broken, deploys are scary, or nobody can figure out why production differs from staging. You've built CI/CD pipelines that teams actually trust. You're excited about AI changing how code gets written, and you want to build the systems that make it safe. You non-negotiably: - Own problems end-to-end and don't wait for a spec - Think in systems and tradeoffs, not tasks - Prize reliability in environments where failure is expensive - Communicate clearly across engineering, product, and leadership - Believe great platform work makes fast shipping possible — not a tax on it You'll hopefully have experience with some or all of: CI/CD and build systems, containerized runtimes, observability and monitoring, API design, automation frameworks, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), Node.js/TypeScript, and AI-assisted development workflows. Aviation or regulated-domain experience is a bonus. These are things we know you can learn. THE HIRING PROCESS Intro call: Get the download from our recruiting team to make sure this is an opportunity that you'll be excited about. We'll want to hear about your motivations and the hardest infrastructure problem you've solved. Head of Product: Deep dive into your previous roles and projects highlighting those experiences relevant for this role at Hamilton. Live coding & technical chat: Live coding using code pad and a technical discussion about