Founding DevOps Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE
As the founding DevOps engineer at a seed-stage AI productivity startup, you'll build and own the operational platform that enables a small engineering team to ship frequently and reliably. You'll help protect a product that handles users' communications, schedules, and sensitive information while setting the infrastructure and operational standards for future growth.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
– Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, using infrastructure as code to make environments easy to create and remove.
– Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollbacks.
– Design and operate observability systems for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
– Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response processes, and lead postmortems that prevent recurring issues.
– Implement security controls for secrets, access, dependencies, audit logs, and privacy commitments.
– Monitor costs and capacity, plan for growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.
– Set operational standards and help build the engineering team.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
– At least 4 years of DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, including production on-call responsibility.
– Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.
– Experience building high-velocity CI/CD and deployment tooling, plus observability systems and incident response practices.
– Practical security experience, including secrets management, least-privilege access, IAM, network boundaries, dependency scanning, audit logs, and SOC 2 work.
– Ability to write TypeScript or Python and understand the application code you deploy.
– Experience with AI-assisted development workflows and the judgment to verify and own shipped work.
– A hands-on, founding-team mindset and enthusiasm for setting standards in a fast-moving environment.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California.