Mindset
You think about infrastructure as part of the product, not as a back-office function. Have opinions on how deployment systems, shared environments, gateways, and audit pipelines should be designed so they are reliable in practice and legible to the people who depend on them. Understand how to turn a local-dev-only system into one that a team can build, test, deploy, and debug together. Are able to balance platform concerns with product realities, and can make infrastructure choices that improve velocity without hiding failure modes.
What you'll do
Half the job is standing up the deployment foundation: CI/CD, shared development and staging environments, and a demo-ready hosting setup that other engineers can use from day one.
The other half is owning product-facing infrastructure, especially the API gateway and audit pipeline that external users and enterprise buyers depend on. You might design deployment workflows, build auth middleware and request routing, implement event logging and observability, codify environments with infrastructure as code, or define the operational patterns that the rest of the engineering team builds on.
Preferred Background
Built CI/CD pipelines and shared environments that other engineers depended on to ship production systems.
Deployed and operated containerized applications across staging and production, including secrets, networking, monitoring, and incident response.
Designed API gateways, reverse proxies, or auth middleware that handled token validation, rate limiting, and request routing between services.
Built audit or event logging pipelines that made security-relevant or compliance-relevant activity observable and queryable.
Written production service code in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar systems-oriented language, and worked comfortably in a polyglot environment.
Established infrastructure patterns from scratch at an early-stage company, including infrastructure as code, deployment runbooks, and environment management.