Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

Sierra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off

Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits

Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

Retirement Plan with company match

Parental Leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Free lunch and snacks

Discretionary Benefit Stipend

Job summary

A technology company in San Francisco seeks a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer to manage customer deployments of its AI platform. This role involves working closely with enterprise customers to design and implement scalable deployment strategies, ensuring compliance and security. Candidates should have over 4 years in infrastructure or DevOps with deep AWS experience. The company offers flexible paid time off, medical benefits, and a diverse workplace culture.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, or solutions architecture roles with customer-facing work.
• Deep experience with AWS services, Terraform, and cloud networking.
• Experience managing deployments in customer-owned environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement deployment strategies across customer environments.
• Manage full lifecycle for critical customer deployments.
• Develop deployment runbooks and automation tools.
• Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success for infrastructure requirements.

Skills

AWS services

Terraform

container orchestration

cloud networking

customer-facing deployment

Go services

observability

CI/CD pipeline design

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

What you’ll do

As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer at Sierra, and a founding member of this function, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments, while helping define how Sierra’s AI platform is deployed and operated across enterprise environments. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to architect, deploy, upgrade, and manage Sierra's AI platform infrastructure — ensuring every deployment meets their security, compliance, and operational requirements. In addition, you’ll establish the standards, tooling, and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable, and partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, Sales, and Customer Success. This role will define how Sierra scales some of its most complex customer engagements.

• Own deployment architecture conversations and execution — designing and implementing deployment strategies across customer environments, including VPC configuration, permissioning, networking, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Manage the full infrastructure lifecycle for some of Sierra’s most critical customers: initial deployment, ongoing upgrades, scaling, and incident support.
• Develop and maintain deployment runbooks, upgrade procedures, and automation tooling to make operations repeatable and reliable.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure Sierra's platform is deployable and operable across diverse customer requirements.
• Work with customers' platform engineering, security, and DevOps teams to navigate their infrastructure constraints and compliance requirements.
• Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success to scope infrastructure requirements during pre‑sales and onboarding, translating customer needs into concrete deployment plans.

What you’ll bring

• 4+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or solutions architecture roles — with significant time spent on customer‑facing deployment work.
• Deep experience with AWS services, Terraform, container orchestration, and cloud networking (VPCs, IAM, DNS, load balancing).
• Track record of managing deployments in customer‑owned cloud environments, including navigating security reviews, compliance requirements, and change management processes.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity with enterprise stakeholders — from platform engineers to CISOs — and turn infrastructure conversations into actionable deployment plans.
• Strong operational instincts: you think about upgrades, rollbacks, monitoring, and failure modes from the start, not as an afterthought.
• Comfortable working in a fast‑moving environment and collaborating across engineering, product, and go‑to‑market teams.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Even better…

• Hands‑on experience with Go services, GraphQL APIs, or LLM infrastructure in production environments.
• Past experience at an early‑stage company where you built deployment operations, playbooks, and tooling.
• Familiarity with observability and incident management in distributed systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation, or infrastructure self‑service tooling for enterprise customers.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full‑time employees:

• Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
• Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension) with Sierra match
• Parental Leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
• Discretionary Benefit Stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full‑time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.