About Shelf

The enterprise is going agentic and we are creating a unique operating system for an automated future.

Most AI agents break the moment they hit real business complexity. That’s why we built a platform that models a company's policies, workflows, and operational logic into an AI Data Model. Shelf enables AI Agents to reliably reason and deliver precise and reliable outcomes at scale.

We already have what most AI startups are still trying to earn: Enterprise customers such as Glovo, Nespresso, and HelloFresh, real production data, and tens of thousands of users. Customers trust us with operational knowledge: Our platform is highly reliable and secure with SOC2, HIPAA-ready security practices, and mature integrations in place.

Location – Warsaw, work from the office.

About the role

This role is for a senior DevOps / platform engineer who can own the AI platform infrastructure that lets Shelf teams ship agentic AI capabilities quickly, safely, and reliably.

We want someone who is strong technically, operationally mature, communicates clearly, and has the judgment to make infrastructure simpler, safer, and easier to evolve over time. Expect real ownership from platform design through production operations.

You will own the platform layer behind model access, model deployment, observability, reliability, security, and developer experience. That includes our internal AI gateway, cloud-hosted models, self-hosted models, VLMs, audio models, and the runtime paths product teams need to build production AI systems.

The team is small enough for platform engineers to make real decisions. Career growth comes from ownership. Titles matter less than the scope you can carry. The people who grow fastest take responsibility for larger systems, unblock product teams, drive reliability, and develop better engineering practices.

You solve ambiguous platform problems by shaping the right operating model, then ship, automate, instrument, and keep it healthy in production.

We build AI-native. Engineers use Codex, Claude Code, and agents they build themselves. We invest in harness engineering through skills, CLIs, logs, traces, and orchestration. In this role, you use that same mindset to give product teams better paths for deploying, scaling, observing, and securing AI workloads.

This is a role for someone in a high-growth chapter of their career, who wants to do the best work of their life, learn fast, and win as part of a team going all-in on a hard mission.

What You Will Own

• Own Shelf’s AI platform infrastructure end to end: model access, model deployment, runtime paths, observability, reliability, security, and developer experience.
• Build and operate the internal AI gateway and the platform services product teams use to ship AI capabilities.
• Enable teams to use cloud-hosted and self-hosted models safely, including LLMs, VLMs, audio models, and other AI runtimes.
• Improve deployment, scaling, monitoring, and incident response for AI-heavy production services.
• Build infrastructure as code, CI/CD flows, environment setup, and paved paths that reduce developer friction.
• Strengthen logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, and service-level visibility so teams can understand their systems earlier.
• Improve security and access control around models, secrets, permissions, auditability, and production operations.
• Reduce recurring toil through automation, internal tools, runbooks, and better defaults.

What Strong Performance Looks Like

• Product teams ship AI capabilities faster because the platform gives them clear, reliable paths.
• More models and runtimes become production-ready without each team inventing its own infrastructure.
• Teams have better visibility into their services and can catch reliability problems earlier.
• Deployment, observability, access control, and incident response become calmer and easier to operate.
• The systems you touch become simpler, safer, and easier to evolve.
• You create momentum without waiting for detailed instructions.
• You handle production issues with maturity and improve the system after the immediate problem is solved.

What We Are Looking For

• Strong senior-level experience in DevOps, platform engineering, SRE, infrastructure engineering, or a similar hands-on role.
• Strong cloud and infrastructure fundamentals in AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Real experience with infrastructure as code and modern delivery pipelines.
• Strong operational judgment around reliability, observability, incident response, and production systems.
• Comfort moving across layers: infrastructure, backend services, AI runtimes, developer workflows, and operational tooling.
• Security-minded approach to platform work: access control, secrets, permissions, auditability, guardrails.
• Clear communication and strong written habits, especially around runbooks, postmortems, and technical decisions.
• AI-native working style. You already use AI tools in daily engineering work and think in terms of leverage, automation, and better workflows.

Strong Plus

• Experience deploying or operating model-serving infrastructure, model gateways, or AI platform services.
• Experience improving developer experience for product engineering teams.
• Experience with GCP.
• Ability to debug problems that cut across application code, infrastructure, and third-party systems.

How We Evaluate Fit

We evaluate fit through ownership, systems judgment, production maturity, and your ability to make complex platform work usable for product teams. Strong candidates can step into an ambiguous AI platform area, identify the highest-leverage gaps, ship practical improvements, and make the system faster, safer, and easier to operate.

What Shelf Offers

• B2B contract
• Company stock options
• Hardware: MacBook Pro
• Modern technical stack, develop open-source software
• A strong AI-native engineering environment with modern tools and room to experiment, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot

Our Values:

Quality - We’re united by our focus on world‑class Quality. Quality in all things – starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch – every email, report, campaign, and piece of code – should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what you’ve done and say, “Wow.” That’s the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanship—your ability to make things better.

Momentum - for us means that you should know that the things you’re responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something that’s stalled, get it moving again. We pride ourselves on “ball movement.” When your boss or team leaves you with something, they should return to see measurable progress. Small, continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions, ideas, and progress. Don’t wait for it to come to you—reach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability - We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations, give each other open and respectful feedback, and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work - We’re here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours, extra effort…and real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other, cheer each other on, drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility - We’re innovating in one of the fastest‑moving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. That’s incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skill…we need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive - Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunities…they’re the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something you’ll share with every team you’re on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficulty…together.

Win Together - We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honesty…real candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company, always acting in service to our shared mission and what’s best for the organization as a whole.