Infrastructure/Platform Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is building an AI-native integration platform that automates mission-critical integrations for companies operating in the physical economy. The platform uses specialized AI agents to handle the full lifecycle of integrations, from understanding requirements through writing, testing, and deploying integration code into production. The company is solving a fundamental connectivity problem where businesses still rely heavily on custom integrations that are expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to maintain. The team is exceptionally small and highly technical, with infrastructure currently owned by the CTO. The company has paying enterprise customers with production integrations and significant demand, creating an immediate need for a dedicated infrastructure and platform engineer. As the first Infrastructure / Platform Engineer, you'll own the entire infrastructure layer from the ground up, working directly with the CTO to build the runtime, agent infrastructure, observability systems, and self-hostable deployment architecture that powers mission-critical enterprise integrations. This is a highly autonomous individual contributor role where you'll establish the technical patterns that future infrastructure engineers will build on, while eventually helping recruit and grow the infrastructure team.

Requirements

3–12 years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or closely related engineering roles
Strong experience owning core infrastructure end-to-end
Experience at a venture-backed startup or high-growth technology company preferred
Experience building infrastructure from scratch
Experience working on greenfield infrastructure or platform projects
Strong production infrastructure engineering experience
Experience operating infrastructure in fast-moving environments
Experience owning systems through architecture, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation
Experience working closely with engineering leadership or technical founders
Experience operating independently with significant technical ownership
Experience working in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments
Experience building infrastructure for production software systems
Experience working with cloud platforms at meaningful scale
Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
Experience building and shipping platform code rather than purely operating infrastructure
Experience working on complex distributed systems preferred
Experience working at high-growth startups or strong technology scale-ups preferred
Experience with multi-cloud or self-hostable infrastructure preferred
Strong individual contributor mentality
Demonstrated ability to solve difficult infrastructure problems independently
Track record of building reliable systems from the ground up
Deep production Kubernetes expertise
Experience operating, scaling, and debugging Kubernetes clusters
Strong expertise in AWS, Azure, or GCP
Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure architecture
Experience designing production-grade infrastructure
Experience with containerization and orchestration
Strong understanding of networking, compute, storage, and cloud primitives
Experience designing scalable deployment architectures
Experience building platform infrastructure rather than solely performing SRE or DevOps functions
Experience writing production platform or infrastructure code
Strong understanding of distributed systems
Experience with infrastructure automation and deployment systems
Experience designing reliable runtime environments
Experience with observability systems including logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring
Experience building systems for production reliability and fault tolerance
Experience designing secure and isolated execution environments preferred
Experience with sandboxing or workload isolation preferred
Experience building self-hostable or single-tenant deployments preferred
Experience designing multi-cloud infrastructure preferred
Experience working with AWS, Azure, or GCP deployment environments
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment workflows preferred
Experience building systems that support AI or agentic workloads preferred
Familiarity with AI agent infrastructure and autonomous software systems preferred
Experience supporting production workloads with complex operational requirements
Strong debugging and incident-response capabilities
Strong understanding of reliability, scalability, and performance
Ability to quickly understand unfamiliar infrastructure systems
Ability to make pragmatic infrastructure trade-offs in an early-stage environment
Comfortable building infrastructure with limited existing patterns or documentation
Bachelor's degree preferred
Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent technical disciplines preferred
Degree from a top-30 Computer Science program preferred when professional experience is not sufficiently strong
Strong practical infrastructure engineering experience can compensate for academic pedigree
Extremely high agency and ownership
Strong bias toward action
Comfortable operating independently
Strong builder mentality
Comfortable building infrastructure from scratch
Strong technical judgment
Comfortable making architectural decisions with incomplete information
Comfortable operating in highly ambiguous environments
Strong problem-solving ability
Excellent debugging instincts
Strong sense of urgency
Comfortable shipping continuously
Comfortable working directly with technical founders
Low-ego and highly collaborative
Strong communication skills
Able to explain complex infrastructure concepts clearly
Comfortable taking full responsibility for infrastructure outcomes
Strong product and business judgment
Comfortable balancing reliability with speed
Comfortable working without extensive processes or structure
Strong ownership of production systems
Comfortable operating as a true individual contributor
Willing to help recruit future infrastructure engineers
Interested in eventually helping build an infrastructure team
Comfortable working in a very small engineering organization
Excited by greenfield infrastructure challenges
Comfortable with high-growth startup intensity
Strong attention to operational reliability
Comfortable dealing with difficult production problems
Comfortable working onsite five to six days per week in San Francisco

Nice To Haves

Experience at a venture-backed startup or high-growth technology company
Experience working on complex distributed systems
Experience working at high-growth startups or strong technology scale-ups
Experience with multi-cloud or self-hostable infrastructure
Experience designing secure and isolated execution environments
Experience with sandboxing or workload isolation
Experience building self-hostable or single-tenant deployments
Experience designing multi-cloud infrastructure
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment workflows
Experience building systems that support AI or agentic workloads
Familiarity with AI agent infrastructure and autonomous software systems
Degree from a top-30 Computer Science program preferred when professional experience is not sufficiently strong

Responsibilities

Own the infrastructure and platform layer end-to-end
Build the core runtime infrastructure powering mission-critical integrations
Design and build a scalable integration runtime similar to a "Vercel for integrations"
Build durable execution systems for long-running integration workflows
Design sandboxed execution environments for safely running integration code
Build self-healing infrastructure that can detect and recover from failures
Build and scale the agent infrastructure powering coding agents
Support AI agents that write, test, and deploy integration code into production
Design reliable execution environments for autonomous software agents
Build infrastructure that allows agents to operate safely and reliably in production
Design and implement the observability layer for integrations and AI agents
Build monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems
Give enterprise customers visibility into the health and behavior of their integrations
Architect and ship single-tenant deployments for enterprise customers
Build self-hostable versions of the platform that customers can run inside their own cloud environments
Design multi-cloud deployment architectures across AWS, Azure, GCP, and similar environments
Build reusable infrastructure and platform components that can support future deployments
Operate and scale production Kubernetes clusters
Debug complex Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure issues
Design reliable cloud infrastructure for high-growth production workloads
Build deployment systems that support rapid and repeatable customer environments
Establish infrastructure patterns, standards, and best practices for the engineering organization
Work closely with the CTO on infrastructure architecture and technical strategy
Make independent architectural decisions in a highly ambiguous environment
Identify infrastructure bottlenecks and improve system reliability and performance
Build infrastructure from scratch rather than simply maintaining existing systems
Balance speed of execution with reliability, security, scalability, and operational simplicity
Help identify opportunities to generalize customer-specific infrastructure requirements into reusable platform capabilities
Contribute to the architecture of the company's long-term infrastructure platform
Help recruit strong infrastructure engineers as the team grows
Eventually help build and lead the infrastructure engineering organization
Take ownership of infrastructure outcomes rather than simply completing assigned tickets
Ship continuously in a fast-moving startup environment
Operate with high autonomy and minimal hand-holding
Establish the technical foundation that future infrastructure engineers will build upon