Principal Infrastructure Engineer / Tech Lead

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

76d•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is building AI-powered forecasting technology designed to help large enterprises improve supply chain efficiency and reduce physical waste. The company develops custom AI models for enterprise customers, requiring sophisticated infrastructure for model training, inference, deployment, and production operations. The company has raised approximately $28M and is backed by leading venture capital firms. Despite its growth stage, the organization remains highly lean, with a small engineering team and significant technical ownership available to early infrastructure leaders. As a Principal Infrastructure Engineer / Tech Lead, you'll be one of the foundational infrastructure engineers responsible for designing and scaling the cloud systems that power custom AI model training and inference. This is an opportunity for a hands-on technical leader who wants to own infrastructure architecture end-to-end while remaining deeply involved in engineering execution, cloud systems, ML infrastructure, reliability, security, and cost optimization.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or related infrastructure roles
Experience serving as a technical lead for an infrastructure or platform engineering team
Strong hands-on individual contributor experience in a current or recent role
Experience owning infrastructure projects from architecture through production
Experience working at startups or early-stage technology companies
Experience building and operating production cloud infrastructure
Experience working with large-scale or highly reliable production systems
Experience with infrastructure architecture and technical leadership
Experience collaborating closely with engineering and technical leadership
Strong ability to operate independently in ambiguous startup environments
Strong technical communication and problem-solving skills
Experience mentoring other infrastructure or software engineers
Strong cloud infrastructure experience
Strong AWS experience preferred
GCP or Azure infrastructure experience considered transferable
Strong Python coding fluency
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform
Strong CI/CD experience
Experience designing and maintaining production deployment systems
Experience with cloud networking and infrastructure architecture
Experience with production monitoring, logging, and observability
Experience with infrastructure reliability and incident response
Experience managing cloud infrastructure costs
Experience with containerized production workloads
Experience with scalable backend or platform infrastructure
Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals
Strong systems design and architecture skills
Ability to troubleshoot complex infrastructure problems
Ability to balance reliability, scalability, performance, and cost
Ability to remain hands-on while operating as a technical lead
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field preferred
Strong computer science fundamentals
Equivalent practical infrastructure engineering experience accepted
Exceptional ownership and execution ability
Strong technical leadership skills
Highly hands-on engineering mindset
Comfortable operating as a senior individual contributor and technical lead
Strong architectural judgment
Excellent problem-solving ability
Comfortable operating with high autonomy
Strong technical communication skills
Ability to explain infrastructure tradeoffs clearly
Strong mentoring and collaboration skills
Low-ego working style
Comfortable working closely with engineering leadership
Strong ability to prioritize immediate fixes against long-term technical investments
Comfortable working in fast-paced startup environments
Strong production reliability instincts
Strong security mindset
Comfortable participating in on-call responsibilities
Comfortable working with ML and research teams
Adaptable and willing to work across infrastructure and product engineering
Strong interest in AI infrastructure and ML systems
Comfortable working with GPU-heavy infrastructure

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting ML workflows or research infrastructure preferred
Experience supporting high-compute workloads preferred
Experience scaling GPU workloads preferred
Experience with MLOps or ML infrastructure preferred
Experience with ETL and data pipelines preferred
Experience with model deployment and lifecycle management preferred
Experience with infrastructure security and data isolation
Experience with SOC2 or comparable security compliance initiatives preferred

Responsibilities

Own and scale the cloud infrastructure powering custom AI model training and inference for enterprise customers
Serve as a technical lead for infrastructure and platform engineering initiatives
Design reliable and scalable cloud architecture across production environments
Build and maintain deployment systems for AI models and production services
Design and improve CI/CD pipelines for reliable software and model deployments
Build infrastructure-as-code systems using tools such as Terraform
Manage GPU allocation, instance sizing, and cloud resource utilization
Optimize infrastructure and GPU costs across production workloads
Build monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability infrastructure
Develop automated testing infrastructure for production systems
Improve visibility into system health, failures, performance, and resource utilization
Own critical infrastructure projects from architecture through production
Build and maintain data and ML operations infrastructure
Develop ETL pipelines supporting varied customer data sources
Implement model versioning and model lifecycle management systems
Support infrastructure powering ML research and experimentation
Drive security engineering initiatives across the infrastructure stack
Design systems that maintain strong data isolation between customers
Improve infrastructure hardening and security practices
Support SOC2 compliance and security requirements
Partner closely with ML researchers and engineers to improve infrastructure reliability and scalability
Balance immediate infrastructure improvements with longer-term platform architecture
Participate in on-call responsibilities supporting customers during US business hours
Mentor and partner with existing infrastructure engineers
Establish infrastructure engineering standards and best practices
Make architecture and technology decisions in a highly autonomous environment
Work closely with engineering leadership on technical strategy
Build infrastructure capable of supporting rapid company and customer growth
Maintain hands-on involvement in technical implementation and production systems
Help shape the company's long-term infrastructure and platform strategy

Benefits

Competitive Equity
Relocation assistance available
H-1B and OPT transfer support
Base Salary: $200,000 – $250,000
Potential flexibility above $250K for exceptional candidates
Competitive startup equity targeted around the 90th percentile relative to market for strong candidates
Opportunity to work as one of the earliest infrastructure hires
High ownership over foundational cloud and ML infrastructure
Direct influence over infrastructure architecture and technical strategy
Opportunity to build systems from the ground up
Exposure to GPU-heavy AI infrastructure and custom ML model deployment
Opportunity to solve complex infrastructure challenges at enterprise scale
Direct collaboration with AI researchers and technical leadership
Opportunity to mentor and shape the infrastructure engineering function
High autonomy in a small, technically strong engineering organization