Founding DevOps Engineer

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

Job summary

Clera is seeking a founding DevOps engineer to own the operational platform and enable a small engineering team to ship frequently and reliably. You will protect user data and help set infrastructure standards for growth.

Responsibilities include owning cloud infrastructure, building fast CI/CD pipelines, and designing robust observability, security, and incident response practices. This on-site role in San Francisco requires a hands-on, founding-team mindset.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in DevOps/SRE/platform infra with on-call experience.
• Hands-on with a major cloud platform, IaC (Terraform or Pulumi), containers, orchestration.
• Experience building high-velocity CI/CD and observability systems.
• Security experience: secrets management, least-privilege, IAM, audit logs, SOC 2.
• Ability to write TypeScript or Python and understand deployed app code.
• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows and ownership.
• Founding-team mindset and ability to set standards in fast-moving env.

Responsibilities

• Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute; use IaC to simplify environments.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollbacks.
• Design and operate observability systems for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
• Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, incident response, and postmortems to prevent recurring issues.
• Implement security controls for secrets, access, dependencies, audit logs, and privacy commitments.
• Monitor costs and capacity, plan for growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.
• Set operational standards and help build the engineering team.

Skills

DevOps experience

Production on-call

CI/CD tooling

Security practices

TypeScript/Python

AI-assisted workflows

Founding-team mindset

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Kubernetes

Job description

About the Role

As the founding DevOps engineer at a seed-stage AI productivity startup, you'll build and own the operational platform that enables a small engineering team to ship frequently and reliably. You'll help protect a product that handles users' communications, schedules, and sensitive information while setting the infrastructure and operational standards for future growth.

What You'll Do

• Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, using infrastructure as code to make environments easy to create and remove.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollbacks.

• Design and operate observability systems for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.

• Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response processes, and lead postmortems that prevent recurring issues.

• Implement security controls for secrets, access, dependencies, audit logs, and privacy commitments.

• Monitor costs and capacity, plan for growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.

• Set operational standards and help build the engineering team.

What We're Looking For

• At least 4 years of DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience, including production on-call responsibility.

• Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.

• Experience building high-velocity CI/CD and deployment tooling, plus observability systems and incident response practices.

• Practical security experience, including secrets management, least-privilege access, IAM, network boundaries, dependency scanning, audit logs, and SOC 2 work.

• Ability to write TypeScript or Python and understand the application code you deploy.

• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows and the judgment to verify and own shipped work.

• A hands-on, founding-team mindset and enthusiasm for setting standards in a fast-moving environment.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California.