Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

About the Role

A seed-stage enterprise AI infrastructure startup is hiring a Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and own the cloud infrastructure powering its semantic AI platform. This is a true greenfield, build-from-scratch opportunity — you won't be maintaining existing systems, you'll be creating them. The architectural decisions you make here will shape how the company operates for years to come.

The company delivers an enterprise context layer that makes AI agents reliable, accurate, and secure for critical business operations in highly regulated industries such as insurance, asset management, banking, healthcare, and logistics. The platform builds a governed, real-time ontology of enterprise data — enabling AI agents to reason with confidence without sensitive data ever leaving the client's environment.

Visa sponsorship is available for this role.

What You'll Do

• Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to power a production-grade semantic AI platform

• Own the full lifecycle of infrastructure decisions — from initial architecture through deployment, scaling, and ongoing operations

• Make foundational architectural choices with long-term implications for the engineering organization

• Establish best practices, standards, and tooling in an environment where none yet exist

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation systems

• Design and implement infrastructure monitoring, observability, and logging systems

• Architect and manage database infrastructure including relational and NoSQL systems at scale

• Implement infrastructure security, networking, and access control policies

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers):

• 5+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure systems in production environments

• Hands-on experience designing and deploying infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or equivalent)

• Proven experience architecting and managing Kubernetes clusters or container orchestration platforms in production

Required skills & experience:

• Deep familiarity with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — including networking, storage, compute, and managed services

• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation

• Experience with infrastructure monitoring, observability, and logging (e.g., Prometheus, ELK, Datadog, New Relic)

• Experience designing and managing relational and NoSQL database infrastructure at scale

• Strong understanding of infrastructure security, networking, and access control

• Comfort operating in early-stage environments — you define the playbook, not follow it

Nice to have:

• Experience building data infrastructure or data pipeline systems

• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, semantic systems, or graph databases

• Experience with machine learning infrastructure or AI/ML platform systems

• Prior founding or early startup engineering experience

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Mateo, CA. Visa sponsorship is available.