Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

About the Role A seed-stage enterprise AI infrastructure startup is looking for a Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and own the cloud infrastructure powering a cutting-edge semantic platform for enterprise AI. This is a true greenfield, build-from-scratch opportunity — you won't be inheriting legacy systems. You'll make foundational architectural decisions that will define how the company scales for years to come. The company provides an enterprise context layer that makes AI agents reliable, accurate, and secure for deployment in highly regulated industries such as insurance, banking, asset management, healthcare, and logistics. Backed by institutional investors, this is an early-stage team where your work will have immediate, outsized impact. Work arrangement: On-site in San Mateo, CA. Visa sponsorship is available. What You'll Do Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to power a production-grade semantic AI platform. Own the full infrastructure lifecycle — from initial architecture through deployment, scaling, and ongoing reliability. Make foundational architectural choices that will define how the company operates long-term. Establish best practices, standards, and tooling in an environment where none yet exist. Drive strategic, high-impact infrastructure development rather than routine maintenance work. 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 (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi). Proven experience architecting and managing Kubernetes clusters or container orchestration platforms in production. Required skills: Deep experience 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 systems. Hands-on experience with infrastructure monitoring, observability, and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, ELK stack, Datadog, New Relic). Experience designing and implementing database infrastructure — both relational and NoSQL — at scale. Strong background in infrastructure security, networking, and access control implementation. 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 experience in early-stage or high-growth startup environments. The Ideal Candidate You thrive in ambiguity and are energized by the prospect of making decisions that matter from day one. You have a strong bias for action, are comfortable establishing playbooks where none exist, and want to be a true founding contributor — not just an executor. Experience at companies building large-scale data or AI infrastructure (e.g., Palantir-type environments) is a strong signal. Location On-site in San Mateo, CA, United States . Visa sponsorship is available for qualified candidates.