Founding Engineer - Infrastructure

ABOUT THE ROLE This is the first infrastructure hire at a seed-stage gig economy and flexible staffing platform, working directly with the CTO on a clear path to leading the infra domain. You will own the full runtime and platform layer from day one, setting the patterns every future infrastructure engineer builds on. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own and evolve the integration runtime platform: durable execution, sandboxed isolation, and self-healing behavior. - Build and operate the agent infrastructure that runs coding agents writing, testing, and deploying integration code at production scale. - Design and ship full observability across logs, metrics, and tracing for every integration and agent workflow. - Deliver a self-hostable, single-tenant deployment of the platform as a standalone product. - Set the foundational engineering patterns the growing infrastructure team will inherit. - Work as a peer to the founders, shipping to production constantly and helping hire the team you will eventually lead. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 of those years in fast-moving, ambiguous environments at a high-growth startup. - Background at a startup backed by a top-tier venture firm or comparable high-growth environment; big-tech-only backgrounds are not a strong fit for this role. - Hands-on experience operating, scaling, and debugging Kubernetes in production. - End-to-end ownership of cloud infrastructure or a platform, rather than contributing to a larger team's system. - Cloud infrastructure focus (not primarily data infrastructure). - Experience designing observability systems spanning logs, metrics, and distributed tracing. - Comfortable using AI coding agents as a productivity tool while applying strong production-quality engineering judgment. - Bonus: experience building self-hostable or single-tenant product deployments. - Strong computer science fundamentals from a rigorous academic background. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary: $175,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available where an O-1 visa is a realistic path. LOCATION On-site, five days a week in San Francisco, CA, United States. Candidates based elsewhere in the US with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco are also considered.