Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Hayden AI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

At Hayden AI, we are on a mission to harness the power of computer vision to transform the way transit systems and other government agencies address real-world challenges. The Infrastructure Engineering team is crucial to the overall success of Hayden products: We own all the underlying fabric that connects thousands of devices deployed in the field with large-scale, multi-region cloud services and applications that interact with the data we collect from those devices. If you are a true force multiplier, you will feel right at home in our team!

Requirements

Experience & Education: 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
Programming Proficiency: Expert-level command of Python or Go (Golang), with a proven track record of building, testing, and maintaining production-quality distributed services.
Data Systems: Deep experience with relational, document, or time-series databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/RDS, DynamoDB, InfluxDB). Must demonstrate expertise in writing performant SQL and optimizing data schemas for scale.
AWS Ecosystem: Extensive hands-on experience architecting and operating at scale within the Amazon AWS ecosystem, specifically leveraging EKS, S3, SQS, RDS, Cognito, and Lambda.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Advanced mastery of Terraform (or similar tools) to manage multi-region, highly available cloud deployments.
Container Orchestration: Solid understanding of Kubernetes (EKS) and Docker, including experience managing containerized deployment pipelines and service meshes in high-traffic production environments.
Systems Engineering: Strong foundation in modern Networking, Security, Distributed Compute, Storage, and Observability (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
Technical Leadership: Proven ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives, mentor junior engineers, and drive consensus on complex architectural approaches.
Strategic Decision Making: Ability to perform "build vs. buy" analyses, evaluate vendor relationships, and contribute to open-source communities where appropriate.
Operational Excellence: Comfortable in agile, fast-paced environments with a "leave it cleaner than you found it" mentality. Expertise in modern DevOps and SRE practices, including blameless post-mortems and proactive system hardening.
Communication: Exceptional communication skills with the ability to translate complex infrastructure requirements into actionable roadmaps for hardware, product, and software teams.

Responsibilities

Architect the Service Backbone: Lead the design and evolution of the core services architecture, providing a robust, high-availability backbone utilized by all cloud services and engineering teams.
Drive Technical Roadmap: Define the long-term technical strategy and architectural vision for cloud services, ensuring alignment with future business growth and technological shifts.
Strategic Decision Making: Spearhead critical architectural decisions, perform deep-dive code reviews, and evaluate technical trade-offs to ensure a sustainable and scalable service ecosystem.
Scale Multi-Region Cloud: Design and manage globally distributed, multi-region cloud deployments using advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure seamless scalability and performance.
Automate Everything: Leverage automation and modern orchestration tools to reduce manual overhead, enabling a self-service infrastructure model that empowers developers to ship code faster and more safely.[1]
Optimize Performance & Cost: Lead initiatives to continuously tune infrastructure for peak performance, maximum reliability, and cost-efficiency across cloud environments.
Uphold Engineering Standards: Establish and enforce elite software engineering and DevOps standards, including rigorous practices for monitoring, observability, and blameless post-mortems.
Incident Leadership: Raise the bar for incident prevention and response by modeling best practices in site reliability, proactive system hardening, and rapid remediation.
Security by Design: Embed security best practices and compliance guardrails directly into the infrastructure layer, ensuring the backbone is secure-by-default.
Cross-Functional Technical Lead: Act as the primary bridge between hardware, product, and engineering teams to translate complex business requirements into robust, end-to-end technical solutions.
Build Consensus: Drive cross-functional alignment on complex technical approaches, fostering a culture of collaboration and shared technical ownership.
Mentor & Multiply: Cultivate the next generation of engineers through active mentorship, sharing expertise in distributed systems, cloud design patterns, and architectural excellence.