Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

About the Role This is a founding infrastructure role at an early-stage AI infrastructure startup building an enterprise context layer for AI agents in regulated industries. You will design and build the cloud infrastructure from scratch, making architectural decisions that will shape the company for years to come. This is a high-ownership, high-impact position with no legacy systems to maintain. What You'll Do Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to power a semantic AI platform. Own the full lifecycle of infrastructure decisions, from initial architecture through deployment and scaling. Establish infrastructure-as-code standards, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation systems. Architect and manage Kubernetes clusters and container orchestration in production. Implement infrastructure monitoring, observability, and logging systems. Design and build database infrastructure spanning relational and NoSQL systems at scale. Own infrastructure security, networking, and access control implementation. What We're Looking For 5 to 12 years of hands-on experience designing and operating cloud infrastructure in production environments. Strong background in a major cloud platform such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, including networking, storage, compute, and managed services. Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi. Production experience architecting and managing Kubernetes clusters or equivalent container orchestration platforms. Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation. Familiarity with monitoring and observability tooling such as Prometheus, ELK, Datadog, or similar. Comfort building from scratch in early-stage or high-growth startup environments. A stable employment history with a track record of seeing projects through to completion. Bonus: experience with data pipelines, knowledge graphs, semantic systems, graph databases, or ML/AI infrastructure. Location On-site in San Mateo, California, United States. Visa sponsorship is available.