Founding Engineer

Jobtailor; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a hands-on AI/ML platform engineer in the Palo Alto area to design and operate data pipelines and cloud infrastructure. You will own ingestion, processing, and deployment layers, build orchestration across training, inference, and evaluation, and help shape the technical strategy with the founders.

Strong Python/SQL, production pipelines, and cloud tooling are essential. You will collaborate across teams to deliver scalable APIs, robust monitoring, and secure,

Qualifications

• Strong Python and SQL fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Data pipelines: Build ingest, process, transform pipelines for models.
• Cloud infrastructure: Stand up compute, storage, networking, deployment.
• Orchestration: Connect ingestion, training, inference, evaluation, serving.
• Operational foundations: Establish CI/CD, monitoring, logging, alerting.
• Application layer: Contribute to APIs and services on the platform.
• Technical strategy: Make foundational architectural decisions with founders.

Skills

Python & SQL fundamentals

Production data pipelines

Cross-stack debugging

Engineering judgment

REST/GraphQL/gRPC knowledge

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Prefect

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

CDK

Postgres

Claude Code

Cursor

GitHub Copilot

Job description

Key Responsibilities

• Data pipelines: Build the pipelines that ingest, process, and transform data for the models.
• Cloud infrastructure: Stand up and operate compute, storage, networking, and deployment from scratch.
• Orchestration: Build the layer connecting ingestion, training, inference, evaluation, and serving.
• Operational foundations: Establish CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and alerting from the ground up.
• Application layer: Contribute to APIs, services, and user-facing surfaces on top of the platform.
• Technical strategy: Make foundational architectural decisions in direct partnership with the founders.

Requirements

• Python and SQL fundamentals that are genuinely strong, not just familiar.
• Production data pipelines — hands-on experience with Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar.
• Cloud proficiency — AWS, GCP, or Azure, including provisioning, IAM, and networking.
• Containers & orchestration — Docker and Kubernetes (or a managed equivalent).
• Infrastructure-as-code — Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK.
• Backend API design — REST, GraphQL, or gRPC, with working knowledge of auth.
• Relational database design — Postgres or similar, including query optimization.
• AI developer tooling — proficient with Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
• Cross-stack debugging — a track record of operating across the stack and untangling complex systems.
• Engineering judgment — sound instincts on trade-offs, not just technical breadth.
• Nice to have: real-time streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis, Flink); open-source contributions; experience with health or clinical data; full-stack product experience shipping user-facing web applications.