Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Department: Research & Development

Location: San Francisco HQ Office

Compensation: $175,579 – $228,253 • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus

Employment Type: FullTime

About Us

At Hayden AI, we are on a mission to harness the power of computer vision to transform the way transit systems and other government agencies address real-world challenges.

From bus lane and bus stop enforcement to transportation optimization technologies and beyond, our innovative mobile perception system empowers our clients to accelerate transit, enhance street safety, and drive toward a sustainable future.

About the Role

The Infrastructure Engineering team is crucial to the overall success of Hayden products: We own all the underlying fabric that connects thousands of devices deployed in the field with large-scale, multi-region cloud services and applications that interact with the data we collect from those devices. If you are a true force multiplier, you will feel right at home in our team!

Responsibilities:

• Architect the Service Backbone: Lead the design and evolution of the core services architecture, providing a robust, high-availability backbone utilized by all cloud services and engineering teams.

• Drive Technical Roadmap: Define the long-term technical strategy and architectural vision for cloud services, ensuring alignment with future business growth and technological shifts.

• Strategic Decision Making: Spearhead critical architectural decisions, perform deep-dive code reviews, and evaluate technical trade-offs to ensure a sustainable and scalable service ecosystem.

• Scale Multi-Region Cloud: Design and manage globally distributed, multi-region cloud deployments using advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure seamless scalability and performance.

• Automate Everything: Leverage automation and modern orchestration tools to reduce manual overhead, enabling a self-service infrastructure model that empowers developers to ship code faster and more safely.[1]

• Optimize Performance & Cost: Lead initiatives to continuously tune infrastructure for peak performance, maximum reliability, and cost-efficiency across cloud environments.

• Uphold Engineering Standards: Establish and enforce elite software engineering and DevOps standards, including rigorous practices for monitoring, observability, and blameless post-mortems.

• Incident Leadership: Raise the bar for incident prevention and response by modeling best practices in site reliability, proactive system hardening, and rapid remediation.

• Security by Design: Embed security best practices and compliance guardrails directly into the infrastructure layer, ensuring the backbone is secure-by-default.

• Cross-Functional Technical Lead: Act as the primary bridge between hardware, product, and engineering teams to translate complex business requirements into robust, end-to-end technical solutions.

• Build Consensus: Drive cross-functional alignment on complex technical approaches, fostering a culture of collaboration and shared technical ownership.

• Mentor & Multiply: Cultivate the next generation of engineers through active mentorship, sharing expertise in distributed systems, cloud design patterns, and architectural excellence.

Requirements:

• Experience & Education: 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Programming Proficiency: Expert-level command of Python or Go (Golang), with a proven track record of building, testing, and maintaining production-quality distributed services.

• Data Systems: Deep experience with relational, document, or time-series databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/RDS, DynamoDB, InfluxDB). Must demonstrate expertise in writing performant SQL and optimizing data schemas for scale.

• AWS Ecosystem: Extensive hands-on experience architecting and operating at scale within the Amazon AWS ecosystem, specifically leveraging EKS, S3, SQS, RDS, Cognito, and Lambda.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Advanced mastery of Terraform (or similar tools) to manage multi-region, highly available cloud deployments.

• Container Orchestration: Solid understanding of Kubernetes (EKS) and Docker, including experience managing containerized deployment pipelines and service meshes in high-traffic production environments.

• Systems Engineering: Strong foundation in modern Networking, Security, Distributed Compute, Storage, and Observability (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).

• Technical Leadership: Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and drive consensus on complex architectural approaches.

• Strategic Decision Making: Ability to perform "build vs. buy" analyses, evaluate vendor relationships, and contribute to open-source communities where appropriate.

• Operational Excellence: Comfortable in agile, fast-paced environments with a "leave it cleaner than you found it" mentality. Expertise in modern DevOps and SRE practices, including blameless post-mortems and proactive system hardening.

• Communication: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to translate complex infrastructure requirements into actionable roadmaps for hardware, product, and software teams.