Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding infrastructure engineering role at an early-stage enterprise AI platform startup, where you'll design and build cloud infrastructure entirely from scratch. You'll own architectural decisions end-to-end — from initial design through production — for a semantic platform serving highly regulated industries like insurance, banking, and healthcare. The choices you make here will shape how the company scales for years to come. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to power an enterprise-grade semantic AI platform. - Own the full infrastructure lifecycle, from architecture and deployment through scaling and ongoing operations. - Establish foundational best practices, standards, and tooling in a greenfield environment. - Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation systems. - Architect and manage Kubernetes clusters and container orchestration platforms in production. - Implement infrastructure monitoring, observability, and logging systems. - Design and manage database infrastructure including relational and NoSQL systems at scale. - Implement infrastructure security, networking, and access control. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 5+ years of hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure systems in production environments. - Proven experience designing and deploying infrastructure-as-code using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi. - Strong experience architecting and managing Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms in production. - 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. - Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tooling (e.g., Prometheus, ELK, Datadog, or similar). - Comfort making high-impact architectural decisions independently in an early-stage environment. - Experience with data infrastructure or data pipeline systems is a plus. - Background with knowledge graphs, semantic systems, or graph databases is a plus. - Experience with ML infrastructure or AI/ML platform systems is a plus. LOCATION On-site in San Mateo, California, United States. Visa sponsorship is available.