Founding DevOps Engineer

Pally (YC S25); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k)

Equity

Job summary

Pally, based in the Bay Area, is hiring a senior to staff level engineer to own how we ship and how the platform stays up. You’ll build and run the cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability so the team can move fast without breaking things.

This is a hands-on role requiring on-call experience, Terraform/Pulumi familiarity, and strong security and scripting skills in TypeScript or Python. In-person in San Francisco, CA with significant equity.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering with real time on call for production systems.
• Deep experience with a major cloud platform and infrastructure as code (Terraform/Pulumi) and containers.
• Record of building CI/CD pipelines and deploy tooling enabling frequent shipping.
• Hands-on experience with observability stacks, incident response, and postmortems that drive change.
• Strong security instincts: secrets, IAM, network boundaries; SOC 2 is a plus.
• Comfort writing TypeScript or Python and reading deployed code.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development workflows and owning everything you ship.
• You’ll set the operational bar for Pally and help hire engineers who join later.

Responsibilities

• Cloud infrastructure: own cloud accounts, networking, databases, and compute defined as code.
• CI/CD: fast builds, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, fast rollbacks.
• Observability: logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards to diagnose issues.

Skills

DevOps leadership

Terraform/Pulumi

CI/CD pipelines

On-call incidents

Security basics

TypeScript/Python

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Terraform

Pulumi

Job description

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

Pally is a personal assistant that lives in your text messages. 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 actually 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.