Member of Technical Staff - Platform

Valkai, Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation with equity

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Generous PTO

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Valkai, Inc. is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to build and operate secure, scalable systems underpinning our agents and products. You will own deployment, observability, security, and performance across cloud and self-hosted environments while collaborating with product and AI engineers.

The role emphasizes pragmatic engineering judgment, strong systems fundamentals, and high agency to drive high-leverage infrastructure initiatives and incident-driven improvements.

Qualifications

• Strong systems fundamentals including reliability, performance, security, data consistency and failure modes.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate reliable infrastructure across sandboxes, clusters, databases, caches, vector databases, and object storage.
• Improve deployment and upgrade systems for cloud and self-hosted environments.
• Build observability, incident response, performance, and capacity systems for production services.
• Improve continuous integration, delivery, and developer workflows.
• Build integrations, indexing pipelines, and retrieval infrastructure that make enterprise knowledge useful to agents.
• Strengthen platform security through isolation, access controls, hardening, testing, and compliance work.
• Own systems from architecture and implementation through production operation and long-term improvement.

Skills

Systems fundamentals

Production ownership

Engineering judgment

High agency

Security mindset

Collaborative mindset

Tools

Next.js

TypeScript

Python

PostgreSQL

Azure

AWS

Job description

THE ROLE

You\'ll build the secure, reliable systems beneath Valkai\'s agents and products. The scope spans compute, storage, deployment, data pipelines, indexing, and retrieval. You will make these systems observable and dependable across cloud and self-hosted environments while helping the engineering team ship quickly.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Strong systems fundamentals: You reason clearly about reliability, performance, security, data consistency, and failure modes.
• Production ownership: You are comfortable operating the systems you build and improving them based on real incidents and usage.
• Pragmatic engineering judgment: You can balance immediate product needs with the foundations required for long-term scale.
• High agency: You can find the highest-leverage infrastructure problem, create a plan, and drive it to completion.
• Security-minded thinking: You treat sensitive data, access controls, isolation, and auditability as core design constraints.
• Clear collaborators: You make infrastructure understandable and work closely with product and AI engineers.

WHAT YOU\'LL DO

• Build and operate reliable infrastructure across sandboxes, clusters, databases, caches, vector databases, and object storage.
• Improve deployment and upgrade systems for cloud and self-hosted environments.
• Build observability, incident response, performance, and capacity systems for production services.
• Improve continuous integration, delivery, and developer workflows.
• Build integrations, indexing pipelines, and retrieval infrastructure that make enterprise knowledge useful to agents.
• Strengthen platform security through isolation, access controls, hardening, testing, and compliance work.
• Own systems from architecture and implementation through production operation and long-term improvement.

NICE TO HAVE

• You have built and operated cloud infrastructure or distributed systems at meaningful scale.
• You have experience with self-hosted enterprise deployments, security programs, or regulated data.
• You have worked on search, retrieval, data integration, or large-scale indexing systems.
• You have led production incidents and made systems more resilient afterward.
• You have worked in a high-growth early-stage company.
• You are familiar with parts of our stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Postgres, Azure, AWS.

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents.
• Generous PTO policy.
• Paid parental leave.

At Valkai, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.