Founding Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

On-site (New York City, NY) · $200K–$270K · 1 opening

Looking for Chinese / Korean speakers!

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About the company

A profitable, Series A-funded cloud infrastructure platform that lets engineering teams run production-grade infrastructure on any major cloud provider without the usual complexity, cost, and lock-in.

The company has grown revenue significantly since 2022, is backed by a top-tier venture fund, and works closely with fast-growing, YC-backed engineering teams. The team is flat, high-ownership, and headquartered in New York with an additional office in San Francisco.

The role You'll build at every level of the cloud infrastructure stack, from production-grade software to the deepest debugging work, shelling into virtual machines and digging through logs to find root causes.

Work happens in two-week project cycles with real autonomy to propose and drive your own work, and you'll talk directly with customers via Slack rather than working through layers of product management.

This is a genuine founding seat: the company wants someone who has already been the earliest technical hire at a startup or two, not someone looking for their first taste of that kind of ownership.

What you'll do

• Write production-grade software that powers the platform across cloud infrastructure surfaces
• Own the end-to-end development lifecycle, from architectural design through production deployment
• Debug at the deepest levels — shelling into virtual machines, digging through log files, and finding true root causes
• Read through open-source repositories to debug third-party dependencies when needed
• Collaborate with the team on anything touching customer infrastructure, giving meaningful, direct feedback
• Work in two-week project cycles with full autonomy to propose and drive your own work
• Talk directly with customers via Slack, bringing real product intuition to infrastructure decisions

What you must bring

• 5–8 years of experience building at startups, roughly the equivalent of two startups' worth of experience, with founding engineer or earliest-technical-hire roles preferred
• A track record of shipping products end-to-end — you can point to specific code you wrote and systems you personally owned in production
• Genuine excitement about infrastructure problems specifically, not infrastructure as a means to something else
• High agency, with real comfort operating without a defined playbook or process
• The ability to debug and reason through complex systems under real pressure

Nice to have

• Prior hands-on infrastructure experience with networking, Kubernetes, distributed systems, or cloud platforms
• Experience shipping products that scaled to meaningful traction or a real user base
• Experience taking a product or feature from zero to one, having built something genuinely novel
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching between technical and strategic work

Compensation & logistics

• $200K–$270K base salary plus competitive equity
• 30 days of PTO, plus 30 remote days per year
• Relocation covered
• On-site in New York City
• 1 opening
• Open to visa sponsorship (H-1B, O-1, OPT)

This isn't the right fit if

• Your infrastructure experience is exclusively from a large tech company, with no startup background
• You can't clearly articulate why infrastructure work specifically excites you
• You're a perfectionist who optimizes for elegance over actually shipping