Senior Infrastructure Engineer

fridayharbor.ai•Remote,

7h•$205,000 - $225,000•Remote

About The Position

Friday Harbor is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to help build the infrastructure foundation for its next stage of growth. Working closely with the Lead AI Platform & Infrastructure Engineer, this person will help determine how infrastructure evolves, lead the implementation, and own systems brought into production. The role combines infrastructure design with support for a live product and real customers. The engineer will evolve production infrastructure through incremental migrations toward a more flexible, cloud-native deployment model; develop foundations for running AI workloads; improve observability, reliability, and cost awareness; and make it easier for engineers to build, test, deploy, and operate services. The role also includes operational ownership, security practices, and collaboration with engineering and biz-ops teams to translate their needs into dependable infrastructure capabilities. Friday Harbor is a Seattle-based startup with a small, fully US-remote engineering team that meets for regular off-sites. The company describes its work as ambitious and offers flexibility and work-life balance. Candidates must currently live in the US and be authorized to work for any US employer. The position offers a base salary of $205,000–$225,000, equity, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Requirements

Deep production Kubernetes experience, including substantial workloads and a strong understanding of scheduling, networking, resource management, scaling, and failure modes.
Experience designing new infrastructure and migrating existing workloads into it, including taking architectural decisions and implementations through to production.
Practical engineering judgment when weighing infrastructure control against complexity and ongoing maintenance, including the ability to explain managed-service versus custom-built choices.
Strong cloud fundamentals; experience with modern cloud platforms, with AWS preferred, or Azure, Google Cloud, or similar.
Comfort with Linux, networking, storage, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform, including how these components interact when troubleshooting production systems.
Ability to write software and tooling that reduces operational work and makes infrastructure easier for other engineers to use.
Ownership of ambiguous problems from investigation through implementation and operation, with clear communication of tradeoffs and engagement of affected colleagues.
Experience usually gained through five or more years in infrastructure, platform, SRE, or a related engineering role; systems owned and judgment developed are emphasized over an exact number of years.
Must currently live in the US and have work authorization to work for any US employer.

Nice To Haves

Operating AI applications, agentic workloads, or distributed systems.
Building execution environments with strong isolation or working with serverless compute.
Supporting Python services and asynchronous workers.
Working on a small team and helping establish infrastructure practices.
Operating systems that handle sensitive data or support regulated customers.

Responsibilities

Evolve production infrastructure by helping define architecture and leading incremental migrations toward a more flexible, cloud-native deployment model, with safe changes and clear rollout and recovery plans.
Build foundations for AI workloads, addressing execution environments, workload isolation, scheduling, orchestration, and resource utilization, and evaluating approaches against product needs.
Develop observability to understand system behavior, diagnose failures, and inform performance, capacity, and cost decisions.
Improve engineering delivery by developing infrastructure as code, deployment workflows, and useful defaults for building, testing, and operating services.
Participate in on-call, improve recovery procedures, test backups, and turn incidents into lasting improvements.
Build security into infrastructure through access controls, secrets management, patching, and data protection.
Partner with engineering and biz-ops teams to understand their needs and create dependable infrastructure and platform capabilities.