Senior Infrastructure Engineer – Hybrid Cloud & On-Prem Systems

Merge Labs • San Francisco, CA

3h • Hybrid

About The Position

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use. About the team: Sufficiently advanced BCIs can restore lost abilities, support healthier brain states, deepen our connection with each other and expand what we can imagine and create alongside advanced AI. Our team is responsible for turning this vision into algorithms. Working across synthetic biology, neuroscience, device physics, signal processing, and machine learning, we design more effective ways to bridge human and artificial intelligence. We design experiments and analytical frameworks, collect data, train models, and optimize performance to build Brain-AI systems that can scale to many people and many uses. We move with urgency, balancing creative exploration with engineering rigor, because expanding human ability, agency, and experience is one of the most important challenges of our time. About the role: As the senior-most infrastructure engineer on the team, you’ll define and own the processes via which teams across the company deploy internally- and collaborator-facing applications. You’ll define and manage the core systems (ACLs, network boundaries, VMs, configuration management and CI/CD systems) that will enable our application and data engineers to deploy a variety of on-premises, low-latency, high-throughput laboratory tools, including both closed-loop automation tools and interactive, clinician-facing applications. You’ll work closely with our hardware team to integrate custom high-throughput hardware into our compute infrastructure. You will be a key contributor to the team’s overall goal of enabling self-service interfaces for scientists, and will design, document and advertise simple abstraction layers that can allow scientists with minimal coding background to deploy their work so that it can be used at anyone at the company. This role reports to the Head of Software and is highly cross-functional—serving users from specialized hardware and data engineers to scientists needing us to run off-the-shelf products internally.

Requirements

• 5–10+ years of experience building and operating infrastructure in on-premises environments.
• Strong fluency in Terraform (or similar IaC), Ansible (or comparable configuration management tooling), Linux systems, and container orchestration (K8s).
• Experience with ZFS, fACLs, and network-level access control.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD, observability, and configuration management.
• Strong software fundamentals and working understanding of the process of deploying Python code to production.
• Proven ability to balance reliability, security, and velocity in a research or data-heavy environment.
• Comfort supporting production users and scientific workloads with minimal abstraction layers.
• Comfort owning systems end-to-end—from design and implementation to deployment and monitoring.
• Interest in enabling science through infrastructure excellence—no prior biology experience required.

Responsibilities

• Define and manage on-prem and cloud infrastructure using IaC (Terraform or equivalent).
• Stand up and maintain core storage and compute infrastructure, including centralized storage, VMs, and K8s clusters.
• Configure secure network boundaries, ACLs, and monitoring systems.
• Deploy and manage internal scientific services (e.g., OMERO) and software-facing services (e.g., Dagster).
• Establish conventions for reproducible, self-service deployment of pipelines and applications.
• Partner with scientists and data engineers to ensure reliable, performant access to data and compute.
• Drive continuous improvement of uptime, observability, and deployment velocity.

What This Job Offers

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