Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $300K – $400K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus

Employment Type: FullTime

🧑🏼 💻 Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer

🎨 About OpenArt

OpenArt is an AI Storytelling and Visual Creation Platform used by millions worldwide. We’re building the next generation of creative tools powered by cutting-edge AI, enabling anyone to create videos, visuals, characters, and stories with unprecedented speed and imagination.

We believe the future of creativity is AI-native, and we're shaping that future.

🚀 Why Join OpenArt

• Small team, massive surface area, senior engineers own real systems, notslices.

• Ship at real scale, your work goes to millions of users, fast.

• Founder-led engineering culture, both founders are technical and deeplyinvolved in product and architecture.

• AI-native product, you’ll design how cutting-edge AI models are exposed asreal user experiences.

• High ownership, low process, we value judgment, clarity, and speed overbureaucracy.

• Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer 1

• 7-10X growth in revenue for the past 2 years. Now you’ll play a critical role inhelping the company scale to the next stage.

🎯 About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Platform & Reliability Engineer to help design, scale, and improve the reliability of our infrastructure, from architectural decisions to hands-on implementation, observability, and cost optimization.

This is not a traditional ops or DevOps role. You’ll work across cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, backend services, and developer tooling, making pragmatic decisions that balance product velocity, system reliability, and cost efficiency—in a fast-moving, AI-native environment.

You’ll partner closely with product engineers to evolve the platform that powers OpenArt, contributing to key decisions around infrastructure architecture, improving multi-provider AI reliability, and helping us scale systems to millions of users—while raising the overall engineering bar.

🛠 What You’ll Do

• Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs across critical user journeys (generation, editing, payments/credits, uploads), and use them to guide prioritization and tradeoffs.

• Participate in an on-call rotation and improve incident response (alert quality, run books, escalation paths), including leading blameless postmortems and driving follow-through on action items.

• Improve system resilience at external boundaries (AI providers, storage, etc.),including timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and fallback strategies. Build and maintain end-to-end observability (logs, metrics, traces, dashboards) so engineers can quickly understand “what broke” and “why.”

• Strengthen deploy safety through CI/CD improvements, automated rollbacks, canary releases, and feature flag patterns.

• Contribute to the evolution of our infrastructure architecture, helping evaluate when to extend serverless patterns vs. adopt containerized or more managed approaches as we scale.

• Improve cost visibility and efficiency, including per-request cost attribution, caching strategies, and capacity planning.

• Act as a strong technical contributor, helping improve engineering practices, tooling, and system design decisions across the team.

🧑 💻 What We’re Looking For

Core Requirements

• 5+ years building and operating production systems where reliability and scaling are important.

• Strong software engineering skills — you can build and ship production code, not just configure infrastructure.

• Experience with cloud-native systems (AWS or GCP), including serverless/event-driven architectures and at least one container-based approach (e.g., ECS/Fargate, Cloud Run, Kubernetes).

• Solid understanding of observability and reliability practices: metrics, alerting, tracing, and incident response.

• Experience designing resilient systems with external dependencies (timeouts, retries/backoff, idempotency, circuit breakers).

• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers across different domains.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and taking ownership of problems.

  Nice to Have

• Experience building internal platform abstractions (e.g., job orchestration, APIlayers, workflow systems) that improve team velocity.

• Track record of improving reliability metrics (e.g., MTTR, SLO attainment, latency) or reducing infrastructure cost.

• Experience working in a startup or high-growth environment, with broad ownership across systems.

⚙ Tech Stack You’ll Work With

GCP, Cloud Run, Modal, Upstash, Sentry, Amplitude, Firebase, Redis, React /Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, etc.

💰 Compensation

• Competitive base salary and bonus program

• Equity - meaningful ownership in what you build

• High autonomy, high growth environment

🌍 Work Setup

• Bay Area preferred (hybrid allowed)

• Visa sponsorship available

• We’ll consider remote