Founding Engineer, Infrastructure

Recruiting From Scratch • San Francisco, CA

10d • Onsite

About The Position

Recruiting from Scratch is recruiting a Founding Engineer, Infrastructure for an early-stage, Greylock-incubated AI security startup in San Francisco. The company is building a platform that gives enterprises visibility into and control over AI models and agents across browsers, SaaS applications, endpoints, and cloud infrastructure. Its platform monitors agent activity and enforces policies to stop risky actions in real time. The company is working with enterprise customers and has approximately 15 active pilots.

The engineer will work directly with the founders on infrastructure at the core of the product, owning networking and distributed-systems components and helping shape the technical foundation and engineering practices as the team scales. The role covers the design, implementation, deployment, performance, reliability, and ongoing operation of production systems, including proxies and gateways, low-latency policy enforcement, data pipelines, and storage systems. The position is on-site in San Francisco five days per week, with approximately 20% of the time spent supporting customers with cloud, VPC, and on-premises deployments.

Requirements

• 4–10 years of professional experience as an infrastructure engineer or in a closely related systems engineering role.
• Experience building and operating infrastructure or distributed systems in production at scale.
• Strong understanding of networking, distributed systems, and performance-sensitive software.
• Protocol-level expertise, including experience with wire-format parsers, packet captures, or tail-latency optimization.
• Experience at an infrastructure, database, developer platform, or technology company where the underlying system is core to the product.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills and ability to own complex systems from design through production.
• Experience working in a startup or similarly fast-moving engineering environment.
• Ability to work directly with customers on technical deployments when needed.
• Willingness to work on-site in San Francisco five days per week.

Nice To Haves

• Experience at infrastructure, database, or technology companies such as Databricks, Snowflake, DuckDB, Stripe, Ramp, Notion, OpenAI, Plaid, or Datadog.
• Experience at security infrastructure startups or companies building networking and traffic-management systems.
• Experience working in the data path, network layer, or data pipelines.
• Experience building proxies, gateways, load balancers, storage engines, or systems using Envoy.
• Experience building low-latency systems where performance is critical to the product.
• Experience operating infrastructure for high-volume enterprise workloads.
• Experience supporting customer deployments across cloud, VPC, or on-premises environments.
• Startup experience and evidence of taking ownership beyond a narrowly defined engineering task.
• Experience with Rust, Go, Python, Envoy, proxies, gateways, load balancers, cloud infrastructure, VPC deployments, on-premises deployments, high-volume data pipelines, storage engines, or queryable event data; candidates need not have worked with every listed technology.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement protocol-aware proxies and gateways that process model traffic, MCP tool calls, and database requests.
• Build low-latency infrastructure that evaluates security policies and performs inline model checks on requests.
• Design, build, and operate production distributed systems for high request volumes and demanding enterprise workloads.
• Develop data pipelines and storage systems that make agent activity searchable and queryable for security investigations, monitoring, and behavioral analysis.
• Solve protocol-level problems involving wire-format parsing, packet captures, network protocols, and tail-latency optimization.
• Own infrastructure end-to-end, including technical design, implementation, deployment, performance, reliability, and ongoing operation.
• Work directly with customers on technical deployments across cloud, VPC, and on-premises environments; approximately 20% of the role is customer-facing deployment work.
• Build across the infrastructure stack using languages and technologies such as Rust, Go, Python, networking tools, gateways, load balancers, and storage systems.
• Collaborate with the founders on foundational technical decisions and help establish engineering practices as the team scales.
• Balance deep infrastructure engineering with customer requirements and the practical needs of a growing startup.

Benefits

• $15,000 relocation support to San Francisco.
• Equity of approximately 0.25%–0.5%; final grant to be confirmed with the hiring team.
• Visa transfers and new sponsorship are available, including H-1B and TN.
• Opportunity to own foundational infrastructure at an early-stage company and collaborate closely with founders.
• Direct exposure to enterprise customers and broad technical ownership.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed