Founding Engineer, ML Infra (AI Systems)

A stealth enterprise security startup backed by leading investors is building an AI-native platform designed for autonomous control, deep observability, and resilient device operations. The team is led by repeat founders and is now hiring a founding engineer to drive the core ML and AI systems that power the product.

Role Overview

This role focuses on designing and operating the machine learning infrastructure, data pipelines, and real-time inference systems that sit at the heart of the platform. While strong distributed systems skills are expected, the primary mandate is to build the infrastructure that enables scalable training, deployment, and lifecycle management of models in production.

What You’ll Do

• Architect cloud-based ML infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Build automated pipelines for data ingestion, preprocessing, model training, validation, and deployment.
• Design real-time inference systems, feature pipelines, and streaming data pathways (Kafka, Pulsar, etc.).
• Deploy and optimize ML models as microservices/APIs with a focus on latency, reliability, and cost.
• Implement CI/CD and MLOps workflows for versioning, retraining, monitoring, and drift detection.
• Manage containerized ML workloads using Kubernetes and related tooling.
• Partner with ML engineers to productionize deep learning models at scale.
• Shape the company’s long-term AI and ML infrastructure roadmap.

What They’re Looking For

• 7+ years building distributed backend systems, ideally supporting ML or data-intensive workloads.
• Strong cloud experience and familiarity with load balancers, gateways, object storage, queues/streams, and observability tooling.
• Knowledge of data/feature modeling, schema versioning, and API design (REST/gRPC).
• Experience with real-time inference systems, streaming pipelines, or MLOps in production environments.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, early-stage setting with significant ownership.

Why This Role Matters

This is a rare opportunity to shape the foundational ML and AI infrastructure of a high-potential company shortly after its inception. You’ll work directly with a small, elite founding team and have meaningful influence over technology choices, system design, and the trajectory of the product.

How We Work

We are full-time, salaried employees of Greylock and provide free candidate referrals/introductions to our active investments. We will contact anyone who looks like a potential match—requesting to schedule a call with you immediately.

Due to the selective nature of this service and the volume of applicants we typically receive from our job postings, a follow-up email will not be sent until a match is identified with one of our investments.

Please note: We are not recruiting for any roles within Greylock at this time. This job posting is for direct employment with a startup in our portfolio.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

• Software Development and Computer and Network Security