Founding DevOps Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

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.