Founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Clera; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Clera is seeking a founding Cloud Infrastructure Engineer in San Mateo, CA to design and build our enterprise-grade semantic platform from the ground up. You will own the entire infrastructure lifecycle, from initial architecture to production-scale deployment and ongoing optimization.

You will implement infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and robust monitoring across the stack, while establishing security and access controls.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure in production environments.
• Strong proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, storage, compute, and managed services.
• Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
• Production experience architecting and managing Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, ELK stack, Datadog, or New Relic).
• Experience implementing infrastructure security, networking, and access control.
• Comfort operating autonomously in early-stage environments with ambiguity and high ownership.
• Nice to have: data pipelines, knowledge graphs, graph databases, semantic systems, or ML/AI platform infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to support an enterprise-grade semantic platform.
• Own the full infrastructure lifecycle — from architectural planning through deployment and ongoing scaling.
• Implement infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation systems.
• Architect and manage Kubernetes clusters and container orchestration platforms in production.
• Build and maintain monitoring, observability, and logging systems across the stack.
• Design and implement database infrastructure — both relational and NoSQL — at scale.
• Establish security, networking, and access control standards from the ground up.
• Set foundational best practices that the engineering team will build on long-term.

Skills

Cloud engineering

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Security & networking

Autonomy in startup

Data pipelines (nice to have)

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

Prometheus

ELK stack

Datadog

New Relic

Job description

About the Role

This is a founding infrastructure role at an early-stage enterprise AI startup, giving you the opportunity to design and build cloud systems entirely from scratch. You'll own every layer of infrastructure that powers a semantic platform used in highly regulated industries — from initial architecture through production scaling. Your decisions here will define how the company operates for years to come.

What You'll Do

• Design and build cloud infrastructure from the ground up to support an enterprise-grade semantic platform.

• Own the full infrastructure lifecycle — from architectural planning through deployment and ongoing scaling.

• Implement infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation systems.

• Architect and manage Kubernetes clusters and container orchestration platforms in production.

• Build and maintain monitoring, observability, and logging systems across the stack.

• Design and implement database infrastructure — both relational and NoSQL — at scale.

• Establish security, networking, and access control standards from the ground up.

• Set foundational best practices that the engineering team will build on long-term.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure in production environments.

• Strong proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including networking, storage, compute, and managed services.

• Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.

• Production experience architecting and managing Kubernetes or other container orchestration systems.

• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.

• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus, ELK stack, Datadog, or New Relic).

• Experience implementing infrastructure security, networking, and access control.

• Comfort operating autonomously in early-stage environments with ambiguity and high ownership.

• Nice to have: experience with data pipelines, knowledge graphs, graph databases, semantic systems, or ML/AI platform infrastructure.

Location

On-site in San Mateo, CA, United States. Visa sponsorship is available.