Founding Infrastructure Engineer
$175k - $300kClera
About the Role
This is a rare opportunity to join a seed-stage agentic integration platform as the first infrastructure hire , working directly with the CTO on a clear leadership track. You will own the runtime, agent infrastructure, and self-hostable story from day one — setting the engineering patterns that every future infrastructure hire builds on. Within a year, the expectation is that you grow into leading the team that owns this domain.
What You'll Do
Own a mini cloud platform — build and maintain a durable execution runtime with sandboxed isolation and self-healing capabilities (think: a Vercel-style platform for integration runtime).
Build agent infrastructure — design, ship, and scale the systems that run coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code in production.
Deliver full observability — design and implement observability pipelines (logs, metrics, tracing) across every integration and agent, packaged as a single-tenant, self-hostable product.
Set foundational engineering patterns — make architectural decisions that the entire future infrastructure team will build upon.
Hire and grow the team — participate actively in recruiting and, within ~12 months, transition into leading the infrastructure domain.
Ship constantly — operate as a peer to the founders; work fast and get things to production regularly.
What We're Looking For
Required:
3+ years of experience at a high-growth startup in fast, ambiguous, under-resourced environments.
Proven experience designing and implementing observability pipelines (logs, metrics, tracing) for production systems.
Hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes , Docker , and AWS .
Strong command of TypeScript and comfort working with PostgreSQL .
Track record of owning infrastructure end-to-end — not just operating it, but designing and evolving it.
Comfortable operating as a founding-level engineer: high ownership, low ceremony, direct communication with leadership.
Nice to have:
Experience building self-hostable / single-tenant deployment products.
Background in durable execution frameworks or sandboxed code execution environments.
Prior experience hiring and/or leading a small infrastructure or platform team.
Background at top-tier engineering organizations (e.g., large cloud providers, developer tooling companies).
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $175,000 – $300,000 USD annually
Leadership track with direct ownership and early-stage equity
Visa sponsorship available
Location
This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA, United States . Remote work is not available for this position.
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