Why This Role Stands Out
As the founding DevOps Engineer, you'll shape the core infrastructure of an innovative AI startup, gaining immense ownership and driving significant impact. This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives on building robust systems from the ground up and is eager to set the operational foundation for a rapidly growing company. Apply now to pioneer the technology that will define our future!
Quick Overview
Job Description
About the Role
As the founding DevOps engineer at a seed-stage AI productivity startup, you'll build and own the operational platform that enables a small engineering team to ship frequently and reliably. You'll help protect a product that handles users' communications, schedules, and sensitive information while setting the infrastructure and operational standards for future growth.
What You'll Do
Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, using infrastructure as code to make environments easy to create and remove.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollbacks.
Design and operate observability systems for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response processes, and lead postmortems that prevent recurring issues.
Implement security controls for secrets, access, dependencies, audit logs, and privacy commitments.
Monitor costs and capacity, plan for growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.
Set operational standards and help build the engineering team.
What We're Looking For
At least 4 years of DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, including production on-call responsibility.
Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.
Experience building high-velocity CI/CD and deployment tooling, plus observability systems and incident response practices.
Practical security experience, including secrets management, least-privilege access, IAM, network boundaries, dependency scanning, audit logs, and SOC 2 work.
Ability to write TypeScript or Python and understand the application code you deploy.
Experience with AI-assisted development workflows and the judgment to verify and own shipped work.
A hands-on, founding-team mindset and enthusiasm for setting standards in a fast-moving environment.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California.