Founding DevOps Engineer

Pally; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Health insurance

Job summary

Pally is hiring a Senior DevOps/Platform Engineer to own how the platform ships and stays up. You will manage cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, and on‑call responses in a high‑velocity environment, ensuring safety and reliability of deployments.

You will work with a small Bay Area team, write IaC, implement security, and shape the operational bar as Pally scales. The role is hands‑on and in SF, with strong equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering with real time on‑call for production systems.
• Deep experience with a major cloud platform and infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, plus containers and orchestration.
• Record of building CI/CD pipelines and deploy tooling enabling frequent shipping.
• Hands‑on experience with observability stacks, incident response, and postmortems.
• Strong security instincts: secrets, IAM, network boundaries; SOC 2 is a plus.
• Comfortable writing TypeScript or Python and reading deployed code.
• Fluent in AI‑assisted development workflows and owning all shipped work.
• You’ll set operational bar for Pally and help hire future engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute defined as code.
• Own CI/CD pipelines, tests, preview environments, feature flags, and fast rollbacks.
• Develop observability: logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards.
• Lead on‑call rotations, runbooks, and postmortems.
• Ensure security through secrets management and least‑privilege access.
• Monitor costs and capacity, plan for growing traffic.

Skills

DevOps on‑call

Cloud platforms

TypeScript or Python

Observability

Security awareness

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Hey , we’re Haz and Wyatt, the founders of Pally.

Pally is a personal assistant that lives in your texts. You text it like a friend. It replies to the messages you’ve been avoiding, books the dinner, chases the invoice, and handles the hundred small things that pile up in a week.

We’re a small team based in the Bay Area, and we’re hiring people who will make Pally the #1 consumer agent in the world.

The role

You’ll own how Pally ships and how it stays up. We’re a small team that deploys many times a day, to a product people trust with their messages, their calendar, and their money. Every deploy has to be safe, every outage has to be short, and every secret has to stay secret. You’ll build the platform that makes that the default, so the rest of the team can move fast without breaking things.

This is a hands‑on engineering role. You’ll build it, run it, and get paged for it. In practice that means:

• Cloud infrastructure. Own our cloud accounts, networking, databases, and compute, all defined as code. Environments anyone on the team can spin up and tear down.
• CI/CD. Fast builds, tests that gate every deploy, preview environments, feature flags, and rollbacks that take seconds. Shipping many times a day should be boring.
• Observability. Logs, metrics, traces, and alerts that tell us something is wrong before a user texts us about it, and dashboards that tell us why.
• On‑call and incidents. Set up the rotation, the runbooks, and the postmortems. Lead the response when something breaks and make sure it doesn’t break the same way twice.
• Security. Secrets management, least‑privilege access, dependency and vulnerability scanning, audit logs, and the controls behind the promises on our privacy page.
• Cost and capacity. Know what every service costs, plan for the next order of magnitude of traffic, and cut what we don’t need.

We’ll measure you on one thing: how fast and how safely the team can ship, and how rarely users notice when something goes wrong.

Profile

This is a senior to staff level role. We’re looking for someone who has built the platform a fast‑moving team ships on, and kept it running in production.

• 4+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with real time on call for production systems.
• Deep experience with a major cloud platform and infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or Pulumi, plus containers and their orchestration.
• A record of building CI/CD pipelines and deploy tooling that let a team ship many times a day with confidence.
• Hands‑on experience with observability stacks, incident response, and the postmortems that change things.
• Strong security instincts: secrets, IAM, network boundaries, and compliance work such as SOC 2 is a plus.
• Comfortable writing TypeScript or Python, and reading the application code you deploy.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted development workflows, grounded in the fundamentals to verify, correct, and own everything you ship.
• You want founding‑team scope. You’ll set the operational bar for Pally and help hire the engineers who join after you.

Practical stuff

$200–300k base + significant equity, 401(k), and health insurance. Full‑time, in person in San Francisco, CA.

We work exceptionally hard. If work isn’t your primary focus, this isn’t for you. However, we also give you full autonomy over your schedule. We don’t care when you work hard, only that you do.

Thanks for reading,