Infrastructure & SRE Engineer — Secure AI Platform, Equity

Crosscheck Staffing; San Francisco (CA); On-site; Full time

Job description

Salary Range: $180K to $250K base plus equity

Company Overview

The company is small, technical, and operating at a high‑ownership stage. They are already seeing strong enterprise demand, including regulated and defense‑adjacent use cases, and are now hiring foundational infrastructure engineers who can help scale the platform.

This is a strong fit for engineers who want to work close to the metal on Kubernetes, containers, networking, cloud infrastructure, secure execution environments, observability, and distributed systems.

Role 1: Software Engineer, Infrastructure

The Infrastructure role is focused on building the core systems that power secure AI agent execution. This person will work on the platform layer that allows agents to run workloads safely, quickly, and reliably across cloud environments.

This role is a fit for someone who enjoys building foundational infrastructure, not just maintaining it. The ideal candidate has strong hands‑on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, networking, AWS or GCP, Terraform or Pulumi, and distributed systems.

What you will work on

• Build and scale secure infrastructure for AI agent workloads
• Design and operate sandboxed execution environments, containerized systems, and distributed job orchestration
• Improve performance across the platform, with a constant focus on speed, reliability, and efficiency
• Build secure VPC deployments for enterprise and regulated customers
• Work on infrastructure involving Kubernetes, Docker, Docker‑in‑Docker, microVMs, Terraform, Pulumi, AWS, GCP, Grafana, and Prometheus
• Debug complex production issues across containers, networking, Linux systems, cloud primitives, and distributed services
• Own systems from design through production deployment

Strong fit signals

• Strong production experience with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems
• Deep knowledge in at least one infrastructure layer such as containers, networking, Linux, storage, or cloud primitives
• Experience building infrastructure systems from scratch
• Strong debugging ability below the surface of managed cloud tooling
• Background from a strong infrastructure‑heavy company or top engineering environment
• Comfortable working directly with founders in a small, fast‑moving startup

Role 2: Site Reliability Engineer

The SRE role is focused on keeping our client’s production infrastructure reliable, observable, secure, and scalable as customer demand grows. This person will own reliability practices, monitoring, alerting, incident response, deployment safety, and automation.

This role is a fit for someone who has operated production systems at scale and can improve reliability without adding unnecessary process. The ideal candidate has hands‑on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform or Pulumi, observability, incident response, SLOs, cloud infrastructure, and automation.

What you will work on

• Own production reliability across our client’s infrastructure platform
• Build and improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and observability workflows
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and postmortems
• Automate deployments, scaling, provisioning, and recovery tasks
• Improve developer experience through safer releases and better operational tooling
• Work with Grafana, Prometheus, Terraform, Pulumi, Docker, Kubernetes, Python or Go, AWS, GCP, Azure, and PagerDuty‑style workflows
• Help keep infrastructure highly available, secure, and ready for enterprise customers

Strong fit signals

• 3+ years of explicit SRE, production infrastructure, or platform reliability experience
• Strong hands‑on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform or Pulumi, Grafana, and Prometheus
• Experience with incident response, on‑call, SLOs, SLIs, alerting, and production debugging
• Ability to automate reliability work with Python, Go, Bash, or infrastructure tooling
• Experience scaling infrastructure, not just maintaining it
• Background from a strong engineering company or infrastructure‑heavy environment

Ideal Candidate Background

Our client is prioritizing candidates with strong recent full‑time experience at respected infrastructure or engineering companies. Target backgrounds include companies such as:

Google, Meta, AWS, Apple, Stripe, Cloudflare, Datadog, Snowflake, Databricks, Nvidia, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Atlassian, HashiCorp, Docker, Grafana Labs, Fastly, Akamai, Confluent, Vercel, Render, Tailscale, Temporal, Box, Palo Alto Networks, Pure Storage, Affir, Splunk, or similar engineering environments.

The strongest candidates will have both company pedigree and real hands‑on ownership. A strong logo alone is not enough. They need to have built, operated, or debugged real production infrastructure.

Must Have

• Hands‑on IC mindset
• Kubernetes and containerization experience
• Terraform or Pulumi experience
• Cloud infrastructure experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Strong debugging ability across Linux, networking, containers, and cloud systems
• End‑to‑end ownership of production systems
• Ability to work onsite in San Francisco 4 days per week
• No current or future sponsorship requirement

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI infrastructure, ML workloads, GPU clusters, or agent execution environments
• Experience with secure execution environments, sandboxes, microVMs, or runtime isolation
• Experience with regulated customers, defense, FedRAMP, SOC2, or high‑security enterprise environments
• GitOps experience with ArgoCD or Flux
• Go or Python experience for infrastructure automation or platform services
• Experience with service mesh, CNI, container runtime, or low‑level Kubernetes debugging