Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure)

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

2d•Remote

About The Position

Recruiting from Scratch is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure) for a fully remote, Series B-funded AI-Powered Marketing Platform company. This role is for a backend-focused engineer who has taken ownership of infrastructure at an early-stage startup and can build the application code that controls it. The emphasis is on engineering and shipping production systems, rather than managing infrastructure through operations alone. The company is scaling its AI agent platform and needs robust, reliable infrastructure to support rapid growth. The infrastructure team is small, currently with two engineers, and is building a novel cloud infrastructure layer without an established playbook. This provides an opportunity for a senior engineer to influence architecture and own critical systems.

Requirements

6–12 years of software engineering experience, particularly in backend engineering and core infrastructure.
Experience building or contributing to core infrastructure at an AI-native Series A–C startup.
Currently writing production application code as a software engineer.
Demonstrated ownership of infrastructure components such as virtual machines, queues, containers, or persistent cloud workloads.
Experience working in an early-stage startup where engineers take ownership across backend and infrastructure.
Strong preference for candidates who have built and operated infrastructure without relying on heavily siloed teams.
Strong backend software engineering skills and the ability to ship production code end-to-end.
Expertise in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Pulumi, Terraform, or AWS CDK.
Experience with Docker and Kubernetes or comparable containerized workload systems.
Deep cloud infrastructure experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP.
Strong understanding of Linux systems, networking, persistent storage, permissions, and runtime debugging.
Experience designing reliable distributed systems, background tasks, queues, locks, and service bus mechanics.
Ability to debug problems across application code and infrastructure layers.
A backend-first engineering profile, with an approximate balance of 60% backend application development and 40% infrastructure.
Experience writing application code that controls infrastructure rather than relying exclusively on configuration and operations tools.
Experience designing APIs, services, and abstractions that other engineers build on.
Ability to build systems for VM lifecycle management, container updates, observability, and security.
Experience scaling infrastructure for production applications and increasing workloads.
Comfort owning the complete lifecycle of technical work, from design and implementation through deployment and debugging.
Experience building core infrastructure at an AI-native, Series A–C startup is a dealbreaker.
Strong interest in AI and experience working in an AI-driven or AI-forward engineering environment.
Comfortable working in a high-intensity, high-ownership startup environment.
Experience making architecture decisions and delivering production systems with limited process or established playbooks.
Ability to move quickly while maintaining reliability and engineering quality.
Clear, confident communication skills in English.
Strong ownership and accountability.
Ability to explain complex infrastructure and backend systems to other engineers.
Comfortable making technical decisions in ambiguous environments.
High technical standards and a strong bias toward execution.
Collaborative, personable, and able to work closely with a small engineering team.
Consistent professional history and evidence of sustained ownership in recent roles.

Nice To Haves

Experience managing per-customer isolated environments at scale.
Experience with persistent cloud workloads, virtual machine lifecycle management, or container orchestration.
Azure experience; AWS and GCP are also acceptable.
Founder or Founding Engineer experience.
Experience working with TypeScript and Node.js.
Experience with Pulumi, Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Linux.
Experience building observability systems or working with monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.

Responsibilities

Own Application Code for Persistent Cloud Environments: Design, build, and maintain the application code that manages always-on, per-customer cloud environments. Own virtual machine lifecycle management, container updates, queues, observability, and security. Help scale the platform from approximately 500 environments to 2,000–3,000 environments and beyond. Build reliable systems that support persistent workloads and customer-isolated environments. Debug complex runtime and infrastructure issues across the application and underlying cloud systems.
Design Scalable Backend Systems and Infrastructure Abstractions: Design and ship reliable abstractions for messaging queues, locks, background tasks, and service bus mechanics. Build backend systems and APIs that product engineers can use to develop new platform capabilities. Ensure infrastructure components are reliable, observable, secure, and scalable. Write production application code end-to-end, taking ownership from design through implementation and deployment. Identify architectural bottlenecks and improve the reliability and performance of core platform systems.
Own Infrastructure-as-Code Patterns: Evolve infrastructure-as-code patterns using Pulumi. Establish reusable infrastructure standards and patterns that other engineers can follow. Work with containerized workloads using Docker and Kubernetes. Apply deep knowledge of cloud platforms, Linux systems, networking, and persistent storage. Improve how infrastructure is provisioned, updated, monitored, and maintained across customer environments.
Build and Scale Novel Infrastructure: Develop the systems that keep customer cloud environments running continuously. Work on infrastructure challenges involving virtual machines, containers, permissions, storage, networking, and runtime debugging. Help build systems for isolated customer environments and persistent cloud workloads at scale. Solve problems that do not have established implementation patterns or an existing playbook. Collaborate with the platform team to make architectural decisions as the product scales.
Collaborate With a Small, High-Ownership Engineering Team: Work closely with two engineers focused on the platform and contribute directly to technical architecture. Collaborate with product engineers to build infrastructure abstractions that enable faster product development. Ship improvements on weekly cycles while maintaining a high standard for engineering quality. Take ownership of critical systems and make decisions with significant technical impact. Bring a strong engineering mindset, urgency, and a willingness to tackle difficult problems hands-on.