Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer

We’re a fast-moving, top-tier VC-funded Silicon Valley startup building ambitious, production-critical systems at the intersection of modern cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, and AI-powered products. We’re looking for a senior, hands-on DevOps / Platform engineer to help us build reliable, secure, and scalable foundations as we grow.

You’ll be our first dedicated DevOps / Platform hire, owning infrastructure, CI/CD, and reliability end-to-end. You’ll work closely with product and application engineers to design systems that are fast to develop, safe to deploy, and resilient in production—from early architectural decisions to hardening and operating systems at scale.

You’ll fit right in if you thrive on high ownership, shipping real infrastructure, and navigating fast-changing environments. We value pragmatism over ceremony, automation over manual processes, and engineering judgment over rigid playbooks.

Things change daily, and that’s part of the fun: you’ll wear multiple hats, iterate quickly, and help shape not just our infrastructure, but our engineering culture from the ground up.

• Own and evolve our cloud infrastructure, with AWS as the primary platform and cloud-agnostic design principles
• Design and maintain Infrastructure as Code using Terraform / OpenTofu (or similar tools)
• Build and operate automation-driven CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions / runners (or equivalent modern CI systems), enabling fast, safe, and repeatable deployments
• Define and maintain modern Git branching and release practices, using CI/CD and test coverage as the enforcement mechanism
• Lead the migration of services to managed Kubernetes, designing for portability and long-term maintainability
• Implement and operate observability systems (metrics, logs, traces) using tools such as Grafana, SigNoz, or modern equivalents
• Own reliability and incident response, including on-call participation, postmortems, and preventive guardrails
• Enable security and compliance initiatives, including SOC 2 readiness, penetration testing, and static/dynamic code analysis
• Partner closely with application engineers to improve developer experience, performance, and production safety
• Empower engineers to ship faster and safer by providing automated pipelines, reusable infrastructure patterns, and clear guardrails

• Strong hands-on experience with AWS and modern cloud architectures
• Strong understanding of CI/CD and automation systems, including GitHub Actions / runners (or equivalent modern tooling), and how they integrate with testing, releases, and infrastructure
• Solid experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu, or equivalent)
• Experience designing, operating, or migrating systems to Kubernetes (especially managed offerings)
• Strong grasp of Git-based workflows, branching strategies, and release discipline
• Practical experience implementing observability for production systems
• Comfort owning reliability, uptime, and incident response
• A security-aware mindset, with experience integrating SAST/DAST, pentests, and compliance controls into engineering workflows
• Senior-level judgment: make pragmatic tradeoffs, prioritize leverage over complexity, and balance speed with reliability

• Experience supporting or leading SOC 2 or similar compliance efforts
• Familiarity with multi-environment setups (dev / staging / prod) and secrets management
• Cost-awareness and experience optimizing cloud spend without sacrificing reliability
• Experience supporting AI or data-heavy workloads
• Prior startup experience or experience as an early infrastructure hire

• Bias to action: short feedback loops, fast iteration, reversible decisions
• Automation first: pipelines, infrastructure, and controls are code
• Reliability without heroics: good defaults, guardrails, and calm incident response
• Written culture: design notes, runbooks, and decision logs that scale with the team
• High ownership: you own outcomes, not just tasks

• CI/CD pipelines are fast, reliable, and trusted by the engineering team
• Infrastructure is fully codified, reproducible, and ready for scale
• Kubernetes migration is underway or completed with clear operational ownership
• Observability provides clear insight into system health and failures
• SOC 2 controls are implemented and audit-ready through automation
• Engineers ship faster with fewer production incidents

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• Be the first DevOps / Platform hire at a well-funded, early-stage startup
• Work directly with founders and senior engineers on core technical decisions
• Build infrastructure that directly enables product velocity and reliability
• High ownership, high impact, and significant growth opportunity
• Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, benefits, and long-term upside