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.