Head of Infrastructure & Reliability (Expression of Interest)

Expression of Interest · Inquire First

We are meeting senior leaders for this planned function as we fundraise. This is an exploratory conversation, not an immediately funded salaried vacancy or a guaranteed start date. No cash salary is available today; any equity arrangement must be agreed separately. You are not being asked to begin work by expressing interest.

Use the Apply form below to introduce yourself and indicate your interest. We can discuss mutual fit, scope, funding, compensation, and timing before either side makes a commitment.

Remote · United States · Full time · Functional leadership

Make large experimental workloads dependable and economically understandable. Build the infrastructure function that lets scientists and product engineers run, inspect, and reproduce work without hiding failures or costs.

Why Subconscious

Subconscious is building the intelligence to run the economy. We start with a simulator for business decisions, using causal experiments on simulated markets to test products, pricing, messaging, and go-to-market choices before capital is committed. The long-term ambition is to help businesses discover unmet demand and build around what people actually need.

The function you will build

Own infrastructure architecture, operational reliability, observability, capacity planning, and infrastructure hiring priorities. Set engineering standards for workload isolation, recovery, and cost attribution. Coordinate security requirements with the company owners and appropriate specialists.

This is a hands-on leadership role. Set the functional roadmap and propose staffing and spending priorities with the founding team. Hiring and budget commitments depend on approved resources; an established team or funded budget is not assumed.

Proposed first 90 days after joining

Use these as an initial agenda, refined with the founders against the product, customer needs, and resources at your start.

• Map the execution path and establish baselines for workload success, queue time, latency, recoverability, and unit cost.

• Identify the highest-consequence failure modes and implement clear retry, checkpoint, rollback, and incident procedures.

• Make spend attributable to workloads and customers, with actionable limits and capacity forecasts.

• Document the operational contract and propose a staffing and infrastructure budget tied to measured demand.

How we will judge progress

Experiments complete predictably, failures are diagnosable, and teams can explain the cost of serving a workload. Set service objectives from customer needs and current measurements, then show improvements in reliability, recovery time, and cost per completed experiment.

What you bring

• You have owned production infrastructure and led meaningful reliability or platform work through growth, incidents, and difficult cost tradeoffs.

• You can design distributed job execution and reason about idempotency, concurrency, isolation, observability, and failure recovery.

• You can lead engineers while still debugging a production issue and reviewing the implementation yourself.

We are looking for evidence of judgment, execution, and leadership. A particular company pedigree or previous executive title is not a substitute for that evidence.

Compensation and funding

We are actively fundraising. Only equity-based compensation is currently available; no cash salary is available today. The equity grant and its terms have not been set for this role and must be agreed before joining. Any future salary, incentive plan, benefits, hiring budget, or paid start date depends on financing and written agreement. Funding and its timing are not guaranteed.

Before deciding to join, discuss the grant structure, fully diluted ownership basis, vesting, dilution, applicable exercise terms, company funding position, and working arrangement. A company valuation is not the cash value of an equity grant.

How we work

Remote · United States. The planned role is full time; timing is to be agreed. Expect direct collaboration with the founders, work across scientific and commercial boundaries, and responsibility for doing the early work yourself. The current role does not include visa sponsorship. Confirm practical collaboration hours and any travel expectations during the initial conversation.

Start with work you already own

Describe a production failure or scaling constraint you owned. What evidence identified the cause, what tradeoff did you make, and how did you verify the fix?

Please do not share confidential employer or customer materials. Bring your questions about our product, evidence, team, finances, and the authority attached to the role. Mutual diligence matters for a decision of this size.