About the job
About Straia
At Straia, we are pioneering the AI-native intelligence layer for colleges and universities.
Colleges currently operate on a myriad of isolated systems, causing staff to expend countless hours reconciling data, generating reports, and seeking insights. Straia revolutionizes this process by integrating institutional data and employing AI agents to provide answers, generate insightful visualizations, and automate repetitive tasks, fundamentally reshaping college operations.
As we progress, Straia aims to become the foundational intelligence layer for institutional operations, facilitating every function—from student advising to admissions and budgeting—through collaborative AI agents that comprehend each institution's distinct data environment.
With recent funding from a16z, Reach Capital, and JFF Ventures, we are on the lookout for a Senior Platform Engineer to assist in constructing the technical backbone for how institutions engage with their data.
The Role
In this role, you will collaborate closely with our CTO and the engineering team to design and expand the infrastructure that drives AI-powered analytics for higher education.
This is a unique opportunity to take ownership of the platform layer for a product that efficiently handles institutional data at scale, runs privately hosted advanced models, and provides rapid query responses for non-technical users who are making critical decisions about student outcomes.
You will also contribute significantly to developing internal tools and automations that enable our lean team to function with the efficiency of a much larger organization. We believe that platform engineering transcends mere system maintenance—it's about creating the leverage necessary for every engineer to deliver faster, troubleshoot more effectively, and concentrate on meaningful challenges.
We seek someone who naturally elevates standards—an engineer whose intuition and speed enhance the productivity of those around them, who takes real ownership of the decisions impacting the platform’s evolution. If you flourish in high-expectation environments with a rapid pace, you will thrive here
What You Will Do
Lead the Data Movement Layer — Engineer and optimize the pipelines that ingest, transform, and serve countless terabytes of compressed institutional data. You will harmonize DuckDB, Postgres, and GCS to ensure that complex analytical queries are executed instantaneously for the end-users.

