Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: United States

Compensation: $220K – $280K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Obvious

We're building an AI‑native workspace—an operating system for work that puts co‑intelligence at the center. Start with data or an idea, describe your goal, and Obvious goes to work: running analysis, searching the web, writing documents, generating tables, designing presentations, visualizing data, building dashboards, and more.

As Steve Jobs imagined the personal computer as a bicycle for the mind, Obvious imagines AI as a garden for the mind. Less mechanical acceleration. More organic cultivation.

What if, instead of just vibe coding, you could vibe‑work? What if getting from idea to done wasn't so opaque, stubborn, and high‑latency?

What if there was a way to consistently deliver work that feels like it came from the best version of you on your best day?

That's Obvious.

Why we're hiring for this role

We need someone who can own the infrastructure that makes every Obvious engineer (and agent) more productive. We want someone to build exceptional build and deploy systems that make rolling back and forth trivial.

We want you to treat infrastructure as a product for builders. We want you to build resilient systems that can handle the unique challenges of working with AI at scale and can thrive under load.

We are small and talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class builders, former founders, and leaders from companies like Netflix, Google, Uber, Meta, Dropbox, Instacart, Shopify, Apple, Datadog and Twitter (X). If you're excited to build infrastructure that enables others to do their best work, join us.

In this role you will:

• Make deployments boring (in the best way possible)

• Own CI/CD pipelines: optimize build times, improve caching, reduce flakiness

• Evolve our Kubernetes (EKS) deployment strategy for reliability and speed

• Manage container builds and lambdas

• Extend our telemetry with better instrumentation, smarter sampling, and actionable dashboards

• Build alerting that catches actual problems and ignores noise

• Make the feedback loop from code to production as fast as possible

• Improve preview environments, local dev tooling, and testing infrastructure

• Eliminate toil and repetitive work through thoughtful automation

• Be the engineer who makes other engineers faster

You will thrive in this role if you have:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on infrastructure at scale

• A proven record of exceptional achievements and impact

• Willingness to work hard, move fast and grow quickly in a rapidly changing environment

• An exceptional ability to learn

• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production (we run EKS)

• Strong Terraform skills—you've managed real infrastructure as code

• Experience building and optimizing CI/CD pipelines

• Hands-on with observability tools: OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Dash0, Braintrust, distributed tracing, metrics, structured logging

• PostgreSQL performance tuning, connection pooling, read replicas

• AWS services: Lambda (event-driven processing, background jobs, API backends), S3, RDS, EKS, CloudWatch

• You've been on-call and you've built systems that made on-call better

• You think like a product manager for internal tools, where the product is developer productivity

• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed

Nice to have:

• SRE practices: SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, chaos engineering

• Cost optimization for cloud infrastructure

• You love the talk "Simple Made Easy"

This role may not be a fit if:

• You don't think developer experience is a first-class concern

• You're uncomfortable with the pace and changing priorities of a startup environment

• You require highly structured requirements and aren't comfortable with ambiguity

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