Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Salient; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Generous 401(k)

Catered lunches

Job summary

Salient is seeking a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to own our cloud footprint across AWS, GCP, and Render. You’ll drive a single standard for infrastructure, forecast demand, and optimize costs as our call volume and customer base grow.

You will collaborate directly with engineering and leadership to ensure reliability, capacity, and secure, auditable systems that support SOC 2 and regulatory requirements. Join a fast-paced, in-person San Francisco team driving AI in regulated finance.

Qualifications

• You've operated production infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP at meaningful scale, and you're comfortable across providers.
• You manage infrastructure as code and have brought messy, hand-built environments under control.
• You've delivered measurable cloud cost savings and can explain pricing models, commitments, and data transfer costs.
• You've planned capacity for spiky or latency-sensitive workloads and tuned autoscaling in production.
• You build monitoring and alerting that catch problems early, and you lead incidents calmly.
• You design for least privilege, auditability, and safe change management by default.
• You favor simple, consistent systems over sophisticated ones and know what not to build.
• You write clearly and can explain cost and reliability tradeoffs to engineers, finance, and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Day-to-day operation of Salient's infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Render, to one consistent standard.
• Infrastructure as code: bringing resources under Terraform (or equivalent), reusable modules, consistent environments, and drift detection.
• Capacity management: forecasting demand, autoscaling, quotas, and headroom for real-time voice and AI workloads.
• Cost attribution and monitoring: tagging, allocation by product and customer, unit-cost metrics, dashboards, budgets, and anomaly alerts.
• Cost reduction: identifying, prioritizing, and shipping savings through rightsizing, commitments, cleanup, consolidation, and provider moves where justified.
• Reliability and observability of the platform, including incident response and post-mortem follow-through.
• Secure, auditable infrastructure that supports SOC 2 and customer security requirements.

Skills

Multi-cloud (AWS/GCP)

Infrastructure as code

Cost optimization

Capacity planning

Monitoring & alerting

Incident response

Least privilege security

Clear communication

Cloud cost reporting

Job description

About Us

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
• Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
• Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
• Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
• Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
• Actively expanding into new financial services segments
• Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

About the Role

We're hiring a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to own Salient's cloud footprint across AWS, GCP, and Render. You will make our infrastructure consistent across providers, stay ahead of capacity as call volume and customers grow, make every dollar of cloud spend attributable, and execute on cost-cutting opportunities.

You will work directly with engineering, product, and company leadership. You will own outcomes, not tickets: reliability, consistency, capacity, and cost of the platform that runs every borrower conversation Salient handles.

What You'll Own

• Day-to-day operation of Salient's infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Render, to one consistent standard.
• Infrastructure as code: bringing resources under Terraform (or equivalent), reusable modules, consistent environments, and drift detection.
• Capacity management: forecasting demand, autoscaling, quotas, and headroom for real-time voice and AI workloads.
• Cost attribution and monitoring: tagging, allocation by product and customer, unit-cost metrics, dashboards, budgets, and anomaly alerts.
• Cost reduction: identifying, prioritizing, and shipping savings through rightsizing, commitments, cleanup, consolidation, and provider moves where justified.
• Reliability and observability of the platform, including incident response and post-mortem follow-through.
• Secure, auditable infrastructure that supports SOC 2 and customer security requirements.

What You'll Bring

• You've operated production infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP at meaningful scale, and you're comfortable across providers.
• You manage infrastructure as code and have brought messy, hand-built environments under control.
• You've delivered measurable cloud cost savings and can explain pricing models, commitments, and data transfer costs.
• You've planned capacity for spiky or latency-sensitive workloads and tuned autoscaling in production.
• You build monitoring and alerting that catch problems early, and you lead incidents calmly.
• You design for least privilege, auditability, and safe change management by default.
• You favor simple, consistent systems over sophisticated ones and know what not to build.
• You write clearly and can explain cost and reliability tradeoffs to engineers, finance, and leadership.

Nice to Have

• Experience with real-time voice, telephony, WebRTC, or streaming systems.
• Experience running GPU or LLM inference workloads, or managing spend on hosted AI APIs.
• FinOps practice experience (e.g., cost allocation programs, FinOps certification) or experience in a regulated industry such as financial services.

Why This Role

Salient runs live borrower conversations for lenders, and our infrastructure spans three providers that grew quickly alongside the business. You'll have the ownership and leverage to make it consistent, predictable, and efficient, with direct impact on reliability for customers and on the company's margins.

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace.

Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.

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