Founding DevOps Engineer

About the Role

Build the operational platform for an early-stage AI assistant company. As the founding DevOps engineer, you will help a small engineering team ship quickly while keeping production systems reliable and secure.

What You'll Do

• Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, managing environments as code.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollbacks.

• Design and operate logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting systems to identify issues early.

• Establish on-call rotations, write runbooks, lead incident response, and run postmortems that prevent recurring problems.

• Implement security controls for secrets, access permissions, dependency scanning, audit logs, and privacy requirements.

• Track infrastructure costs and capacity, plan for growth, and reduce waste.

• Set platform standards and help hire and onboard future infrastructure engineers.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including production on-call responsibilities.

• Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.

• A track record of building deployment tooling and CI/CD pipelines that support frequent, reliable releases.

• Experience with observability, incident response, and postmortems.

• Strong security fundamentals, including secrets management, least-privilege access, network boundaries, and compliance work such as SOC 2.

• Ability to write TypeScript or Python and understand application code in production systems.

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools while verifying and taking responsibility for shipped code.

• A hands-on, early-team mindset, with experience managing costs and capacity as systems grow.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California, United States.