Member of Technical Staff - Platform Foundations

Sierra Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Stock options

Health & wellness benefits

Meals provided

Parental leave

Unlimited PTO (US)

Visa sponsorship

Team events

Job summary

Reflection is a research lab focused on open, accessible intelligence. We build a foundations platform to accelerate engineering teams with reliable infrastructure, SRE capabilities, and high-throughput data tooling.

Our team defines cloud architecture, security guardrails, and developer tooling to ensure fast shipping without compromising reliability or cost. We offer a high-agency, fast-paced environment with visa sponsorship where applicable, competitive compensation, and strong emphasis on

Qualifications

• Strong infrastructure or platform engineering background shipping production-grade systems.
• Expertise in one of cloud platforms, network engineering, security architecture, or developer tooling with working knowledge of others.
• Ability to navigate complex multi-team environments and build for reliability and scale.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the foundational platform layer used by all engineering teams.
• Define golden paths for cloud projects, networking, and access patterns to make secure and scalable choices easy.
• Maintain observability and cost governance across services and infrastructure.
• Own developer infrastructure such as build systems, CI/CD, caching, and test infrastructure.

Skills

Cloud platforms

Multi-cloud architecture

Network engineering

Security architecture

Developer tooling

Observability

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Bazel

Job description

Our Mission

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. We build open models that let anyone control their intelligence and help shape the future of AI. Our mission: make intelligence open and accessible to all.

Foundations

Vision:

Build and operate a company-wide foundations platform that accelerates every team by providing reliable, scalable developer infrastructure, SRE capabilities, and high-throughput data ingestion tooling enabling Reflection to move faster as we scale.

What This Team Does

Build and operate the foundational platform layer that every engineering team depends on. Define opinionated golden paths for cloud infrastructure, networking, and access patterns so the safe and scalable path is also the easiest to follow. Work across cloud infrastructure, network primitives, security guardrails, and developer tooling to ensure engineers can ship quickly without sacrificing reliability, security, or cost predictability.

• Define and maintain golden paths for cloud projects, networking, and access patterns.
• Ship secure defaults and guardrails that make the safe path the easy path.
• Build and operate core networking primitives including routing, DNS, load balancing, and connectivity.
• Establish baseline observability and operational hygiene across services and infrastructure.
• Own developer infrastructure such as build systems, CI/CD, caching, and test infrastructure to keep engineers shipping fast.
• Drive cloud cost visibility and reduction through tooling, guardrails, and optimization without slowing teams down.

What You'll Work With

• Cloud & Multi-Cloud Architecture: GCP, AWS, multi-cloud design, VPC architecture, private DNS, load balancers, advanced routing (BGP), large-scale Kubernetes clusters, control plane scaling.
• Identity & Security Foundations: IAM, OIDC, RBAC, KMS, secrets management, policy-as-code (OPA, Gatekeeper), secure defaults, cloud guardrails.
• Infrastructure & Automation: Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes foundations, CI/CD systems, Bazel, build caching, hermetic builds.
• Observability & Cost Governance: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, logging and metrics systems, FinOps, cloud cost optimization.

About You

• Strong infrastructure or platform engineering background with experience shipping production-grade systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of: cloud platforms, network engineering, security architecture, or developer tooling — with working knowledge across the others.
• Comfortable navigating complex multi-team environments, debugging hard infrastructure problems, and building for reliability and scale.
• Thrive in a high-agency, fast-paced environment; bias toward action and impact.
• Excited about zero to one challenges — building new systems rather than maintaining legacy ones.
• Collaborative, clear communicator, comfortable working across research and infrastructure boundaries.
• Motivated by creating the secure, self-serve foundation that the world's most capable open-weight AI systems are built on.

What We Offer:

We believe that to make intelligence open and accessible to all, you need to start at the foundation. Joining Reflection means building from the ground up as part of a talent-dense team. You will help define our future as a company, and help define the future of open foundational models.

We want you to do the most impactful work of your career with the confidence that you and the people you care about most are supported.

• Top-tier compensation: Salary and equity structured to recognize and retain our talent globally.
• Stock options: Everyone who joins and contributes to Reflection's success gets to share in the upside through stock options.
• Health & wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life, with an annual wellness allowance.
• Meals: Lunch and dinner are provided in the office daily.
• Life & family: 22 weeks paid parental leave for all new birthing and non-birthing parents, including adoptive and surrogate journeys.
• Vacation days: Unlimited paid time off in the U.S. and 30 days in the U.K.
• Sponsorship support: We sponsor visas to help exceptional talent join our team and support long-term immigration pathways where applicable.
• Team building: We have regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations.

Export Control Notice: This position may require access to technology or source code subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations. Any offer of employment for this role may be conditioned on the Company's ability to provide the candidate with access to such technology or source code in compliance with applicable U.S. export control laws, which may require the Company to seek government authorization.

Candidate and Employee Privacy Notice: We collect and process personal data about applicants for the purposes described in our Candidate and Employee Privacy Notice