Lead Infrastructure Engineer

Brisk Teaching; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Platform leadership experience

Security best practices

Job summary

Brisk Teaching is seeking a leader to own and grow Brisk's Platform team — the group responsible for the core infrastructure, shared services, and developer experience that everything else at Brisk is built on.

In a player-coach role, you will mentor engineers, drive the AWS-based infrastructure, and ensure reliability and security as Brisk scales. You will collaborate with product, design, and leadership from day one.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering with a focus on infrastructure.
• People management experience or track record as a tech lead/mentor.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and monitoring tools.
• Problem-solving mentality with ability to move between infra, backend, and product work.
• Excellent written and oral communication; proactive and autonomous.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap and technical direction for Brisk's platform, including core infrastructure and developer tooling.
• Mentor and grow a small platform/infrastructure engineering team.
• Stay hands-on: design, build, and maintain AWS-based infrastructure powering Brisk products.
• Drive reliability and scalability as user base grows.
• Lead observability, monitoring, incident response, and on-call practices.
• Partner with product engineers to keep development workflows smooth and production stable.
• Make architectural calls balancing rapid product development with long-term reliability and security.

Skills

Platform leadership

AWS

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Mentoring/People management

Communication

Job description

Brisk Teaching is the leading AI platform for K-12 educators, empowering teachers to deliver personalized, curriculum-aligned instruction at scale. Our Classroom Intelligence tools connect teachers, students, and curriculum—making meaningful learning happen in classrooms every day. We believe the best technology is cutting-edge, respects teachers’ time, integrates into real classrooms, and helps educators focus on what matters most.

Since launching, Brisk has experienced rapid growth. Over 2 million teachers use our platform, and we partner with districts and schools nationwide to transform how educators teach and how students learn.

We're backed by leading venture and edtech investors including Bessemer Venture Partners (Shopify, LinkedIn, Anthropic, Perplexity) and Owl Ventures (Newsela, Quizlet, MasterClass), with a team spanning top AI companies and real classroom experience.

We're a fast-moving, collaborative team driven by a shared commitment to educator impact and product excellence. Our values—urgency, ownership, and focus—shape how we build and who we are.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

We're looking for a leader to own and grow Brisk's Platform team — the group responsible for the core infrastructure, shared services, and developer experience that everything else at Brisk is built on.

We’re looking for someone who is excited to jump into leading the day-to-day of the current Platform team members while staying close to the technical work. You'll work closely with our team on driving forward our roadmap, collaborating and coordinating with the rest of our engineering work, and making sure that the Platform team is keeping Brisk reliable as we scale. You'll also develop the engineers who keep it all running.

This is a player-coach role on a small, high-impact team. You'll work closely with product, design, and leadership, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

YOU WILL:

• Own the roadmap and partner with our team on technical direction for Brisk's platform — core infrastructure, CI/CD, developer tooling, and shared services.
• Mentor, and grow a small team of platform/infrastructure engineers (or grow into managing one, if you join as an IC).
• Stay hands-on: design, build, and maintain the AWS-based infrastructure that powers our products.
• Drive reliability and scalability so performance stays seamless as our user base expands.
• Lead observability, monitoring, incident response, and on-call practices.
• Partner with product engineers to keep development workflows smooth and production stable.
• Make the architectural calls that balance rapid product development with long-term reliability and security.

YOU HAVE:

• 7+ years in software engineering with a strong focus on infrastructure.
• People management experience, or a track record as a tech lead/mentor with a clear desire to people manage.
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and monitoring tools.
• A problem-solving mentality — comfortable moving between infra, backend, and occasional product work.
• Strong written and oral communication, a proactive mindset, and the ability to operate independently in ambiguity.

BONUS POINTS:

• Experience building or leading a Platform / Infrastructure / DevEx team.
• Background in security best practices for infrastructure and data.
• Previous experience in a startup environment or small, fast-moving team.
• Experience working with AI-powered systems or integrating AI into infrastructure.
• Experience with analytics infrastructure and data pipelines.
• Experience managing cloud costs.

Equal Employment Opportunity & Diversity

• At Brisk, we believe that diverse perspectives make better teams and stronger products. We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.