Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Shepherd • San Francisco, CA

2d

About The Position

We're seeking a Lead Infrastructure Engineer to join our founding team. This isn’t just a job- it’s a chance to architect and scale the foundation of an AI-native legal platform from the ground up. You’ll work directly with the founding team to design and own the infrastructure that powers Shepherd — ensuring our systems are secure, reliable, and built to handle sensitive legal workflows at scale. This role sits at the core of everything we do: from AI pipelines and data systems to application performance and security. As an early member of the team, you’ll have full ownership over Shepherd’s infrastructure, DevOps practices, and security posture- building the systems, standards, and tooling that enable rapid product development without compromising trust. This is a rare opportunity to define the infrastructure backbone of a category-defining company operating at the intersection of AI, legal services, and regulated data.

Requirements

• 6–10+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering roles
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern infrastructure tooling
• Expertise in CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes or similar)
• Experience building and scaling production systems with high reliability and uptime requirements
• Strong understanding of security best practices, including IAM, encryption, and network security
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Ability to design systems for scalability, fault tolerance, and performance
• Comfortable operating as a technical leader and making high-impact decisions

Nice To Haves

• Experience supporting AI/ML infrastructure (LLMs, vector databases, distributed workloads)
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, GDPR, or similar
• Experience in regulated industries (legal, fintech, healthcare, etc.)
• Background as an early or founding engineer in a startup environment
• Experience building internal developer platforms or tooling

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and manage Shepherd’s cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Own deployment pipelines, CI/CD systems, and developer infrastructure
• Architect scalable, high-availability systems to support a growing AI-native application
• Build and manage infrastructure for AI workloads (LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, RAG pipelines)
• Establish best practices for monitoring, logging, alerting, and incident response
• Implement and maintain strong security and compliance standards (SOC 2 readiness, data encryption, access controls)
• Ensure reliable handling of sensitive and privileged legal data
• Optimize system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability
• Collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to support rapid iteration and deployment
• Evaluate and integrate new infrastructure tools and technologies as the platform evolves
• Lead infrastructure strategy and help hire and mentor future infrastructure and DevOps engineers

Benefits

• Competitive compensation: $150,000 – $165,000 base salary
• Meaningful equity: Early-stage ownership with significant upside
• Direct impact: Own and define Shepherd’s infrastructure, security, and scalability from day one
• Cutting-edge systems: Work on AI-native infrastructure and modern cloud architectures
• Professional growth: Opportunity to build and lead the infrastructure function as the company scales
• Mission-driven work: Help democratize access to high-quality legal services for startups

What This Job Offers

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