Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Founding SRE)

Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure (Founding SRE) Location: Palo Alto, CA | Hybrid (4 days onsite) Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 base + equity + annual bonus Employment: Full-time Experience: 5–16 years About the Opportunity Our client, a rapidly growing, venture-backed Series A technology company is building an AI-native platform for enterprise brands. Founded by experienced technology leaders, the client recently secured $30 million in Series A funding and operates a platform processing more than 10 million conversations weekly. With a growing enterprise customer base, the client is expanding its engineering organization and seeking a highly experienced Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure to help lead its next phase of technical growth. This is an opportunity to join as one of the company's first dedicated infrastructure engineers, with significant ownership over production reliability, distributed systems, and infrastructure architecture. What You'll Do Own and scale production infrastructure supporting high-volume data ingestion and real-time AI workloads. Build, optimize, and maintain ETL pipelines and distributed data processing systems. Design and operate cloud infrastructure using AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code. Improve production reliability, observability, deployment automation, and CI/CD. Participate in on-call rotations, troubleshoot production incidents, and drive incident resolution. Build backend services, internal tools, and customer-facing product features using Python, TypeScript, or Java. Collaborate across engineering and product teams to deliver scalable, reliable solutions. Help establish and mature SRE practices, operational standards, and infrastructure architecture. Requirements and Qualifications **Candidates must meet the following requirements to be considered: 5–16 years of relevant engineering experience, including substantial hands-on infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering. Proven ownership of production systems, including deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and reliability. Recent engineering experience at an early-stage or rapidly scaling technology startup, preferably within the last 4–5 years. Strong software engineering proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or Java. Hands-on production experience with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure. Practical experience with Kubernetes and distributed systems. Production experience using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform. Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation. Demonstrated experience with production ETL, high-volume data ingestion, or distributed data processing systems. Proven contributions to both infrastructure/backend systems and customer-facing frontend/product engineering. Experience with production incident response, operational troubleshooting, and reliability improvements. Ability to independently own complex engineering initiatives in a fast-paced startup environment. Completed degree. U.S. work authorization or eligibility for an employer-supported visa transfer. New visa sponsorship is unavailable. Ability to work onsite in Palo Alto four days per week, or willingness to relocate. Highly Preferred Qualifications Establishing or significantly improving an SRE practice at an early-stage startup. Scaling infrastructure during rapid customer growth. Operating high-throughput distributed data pipelines with measurable production volume. PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Temporal, or similar distributed data technologies. Strong hands-on experience with Pulumi. Significant production on-call and incident response ownership. Experience delivering customer-facing full-stack features alongside infrastructure work. Before You Apply!! This is a hands-on infrastructure engineering position requiring both deep operational expertise and demonstrated software development ownership. This opportunity is not intended for candidates whose experience is limited to cloud administration, traditional DevOps support, frontend development, or backend application development without production infrastructure ownership. Qualified applicants should be prepared to discuss: The largest production ETL or data ingestion system they have personally owned, including volume and architecture. Their direct ownership of AWS, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD. Full-stack product features they have personally delivered. Their experience managing production incidents and improving system reliability. Their recent startup experience and individual engineering contributions. Please, apply with your current resume and relevant technical accomplishments.