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.