Founding Software Engineer: Build ML Platform & Cloud

Stealth Startup; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup seeks an experienced Founding Software Engineer to help build foundational models for structured data and scale production ML platforms. You will own broad swaths of the technology stack, from backend services and APIs to cloud infrastructure and security.

This early-stage role emphasizes decisive autonomy and impactful, cross-functional contributions. Responsibilities include designing, deploying, and operating core capabilities, containers and GPU workloads, and developing

Qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience in high-ownership environments.
• Strong Python skills and production backend experience.
• Experience designing reliable APIs and distributed systems.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Knowledge of containers, databases, networking, storage, and operations.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response.
• Experience deploying or supporting production machine learning systems.
• Understanding of security, IAM, encryption, and data isolation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, and operate core product and platform capabilities.
• Develop production backend services, APIs, SDKs, and customer-facing apps.
• Design scalable infrastructure for ML training and inference workloads.
• Create secure deployment options for hosted and customer-managed environments.
• Package and operate containerized apps and GPU workloads.
• Build reliable systems for asynchronous jobs, storage, and observability.
• Own cloud infra, networking, deployment automation, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Set engineering standards for architecture, testing, security, and reliability.
• Make foundational technology decisions and help define the roadmap.

Skills

Python

Backend design

Distributed systems

Cloud

CI/CD

Security

IaC

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Stealth Startup seeks an experienced Founding Software Engineer to help build foundational models for structured data and scale production ML platforms. You will own broad swaths of the technology stack, from backend services and APIs to cloud infrastructure and security.

This early-stage role emphasizes decisive autonomy and impactful, cross-functional contributions. Responsibilities include designing, deploying, and operating core capabilities, containers and GPU workloads, and developing