---
title: 'Platform Engineer, APIs and Security at adaption'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-apis-and-security-adaption-san-francisco-m5790sxrdh93'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Platform Engineer, APIs and Security at adaption

- **Company:** adaption
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/adaption/75df104c-b7c0-4337-a324-0d472da34153

## Job description

## The role

You'll build the multi-tenant platform that turns our inference infrastructure into a product enterprises and sovereign customers can trust. You'll own the systems between customers and our inference stack: authentication, tenant isolation, quotas, metering, entitlements, and the public API. Security and auditability are core product requirements, not layers added later.

## Responsibilities

- Build the multi-tenant control plane, including credentials, quotas, rate limits, and tenant isolation.
- Own our public inference APIs, including streaming, versioning, compatibility, and migrations.
- Implement accurate usage metering, credit reservation, and entitlement enforcement.
- Build enterprise capabilities such as SSO, access controls, audit logs, and data residency.
- Test and continuously strengthen the tenant boundary.

## Qualifications

- 5+ years in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering, including ownership of a multi-tenant API or control plane.
- Deep knowledge of authentication, credential management, rate limiting, quotas, and tenant isolation.
- Strong Python skills and sound API design judgment, ideally with high-throughput or streaming APIs.
- Experience with metering, billing, credits, or entitlements, including idempotency, reconciliation, and audit trails.
- Experience with enterprise or regulated environments, such as SSO, SAML/OIDC, SOC 2, data residency, or sovereign deployments.

Above all, we're looking for great teammates who make work feel lighter and aren't afraid to go out on a limb with bold ideas. You don't need to be perfect, but you do need to be adaptable. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check every box.

## About us

Most AI is frozen in place - it doesn't adapt to the world. We think that's backwards. Our mandate is to build efficient intelligence that evolves in real-time. Our vision is AI systems that are flexible, personalized, and accessible to everyone. We believe efficiency is what makes this possible - it's how we expand access and ensure innovation benefits the many, not the few. We believe in talent density: bringing together the best and most driven individuals to push the boundaries of continual adaptation. We're looking for builders and creative thinkers ready to shape the next era of intelligence.

## Benefits

- Flexible work: In-person collaboration in the Bay Area, a distributed global-first team, and team offsites.
- Adaption Passport: Annual travel stipend to explore a country you've never visited. We're building intelligence that evolves alongside you, so we encourage you to keep expanding your horizons.
- Lunch Stipend: Weekly meal allowance for take-out or grocery delivery.
- Well-Being: Comprehensive medical benefits and generous paid time off.

## About adaption

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Adaption builds adaptive AI systems that learn continuously and efficiently, moving beyond static models and expensive retraining cycles.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage – $50M raised) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (founding team assembled around late 2025 / early 2026)
- **Founders**: Sara Hooker (former VP Research at Cohere) and Sudip Roy (former Director of Inference Computing at Cohere) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
- **Target Customers**: B2B / Enterprise (hiring for Head of Enterprise Sales) [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Mission / Purpose**: Build extremely efficient AI that adapts in real time, treating constraints like latency, memory, cost, and energy as first-class design inputs so that intelligence evolves through interaction rather than brute-force scaling. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)

## Products & Services
- **[Adaptive Intelligence Platform]**: A system designed for continuous, on-the-fly learning without costly retraining or extensive prompt engineering. Combines adaptive data shaping, gradient-free learning, and co-designed hardware-algorithms to deliver highly efficient, domain-adaptable AI tailored to each task. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/) – currently in waitlist phase.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (company declined to provide) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Key Metric**: $50M Seed Funding (led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, and Neo) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Emergence Capital (lead), Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, Neo [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 15 employees with +58.8% monthly growth; 23 active job postings; operates in 5 countries (US, Canada, India, Brazil, Peru); research team has 150+ publications across top AI conferences; backers include key players in AI and venture capital [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Efficiency-first approach**: Unlike most labs chasing scale, Adaption prioritises low compute, low cost, and continuous adaptation – treating constraints as innovation drivers.
- **Real-time learning**: Enables models to update on-the-fly without retraining or fine-tuning, reducing enterprise overhead and latency.
- **World-class research talent**: Team brings deep expertise from Cohere, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon, with a track record of influential publications (including work on the “slow death of scaling”) [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)
- **Co-design of hardware and algorithms**: Systems are built from the ground up with serving constraints in mind, promising better efficiency at scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current Priority**: Move from waitlist to product-market fit, hiring across research, engineering, GTM, and design to build and deploy the first generation of adaptive AI for enterprise customers.
- **Direction for Growth**: Expand the platform to multiple industries and specialisations while continuing research into adaptive compute, on-the-fly alignment, and dynamic learning strategies. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Emphasises efficiency, real-world interaction, and product excellence as core design values. The team is small (~15 people), offering high impact and ownership from day one.
- **Work Model**: Hybrid, remote, and onsite options available across locations including San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, and Singapore [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Roles**: Open positions in research (Research Scientist, Applied ML Engineer), engineering (Distributed Systems, Inference Platform), GTM (Growth Lead, Head of Enterprise Sales), and design (Product Designer). Contracts and full-time available.
- **Notable Perks**: Work with world-class AI researchers, access to strong funding runway, and the chance to define an entirely new approach to AI that challenges the dominant scaling paradigm.

## Sources
1. [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
3. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)
4. [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
5. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Other roles at adaption

- [Agent Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/agent-systems-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-h8cqnbdpdary) — San Francisco, CA
- [Inference Performance Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-performance-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-4zph5352xw0h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding GTM Lead (North America)](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-gtm-lead-north-america-adaption-united-states-hckjtb0982gr) — United States
- [Modelling Resident](https://feeny.ai/job/modelling-resident-adaption-united-kingdom-dvtjh2en67mp) — United Kingdom
- [Senior Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-research-scientist-adaption-united-states-7zjjgvcywxmc) — United States
- [Research Scientist / Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-adaption-united-states-gmjs4gbd3y7b) — United States