Principal Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

Whirl AI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Employer-paid health plan

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Whirl AI, Inc. seeks a Principal Cloud Engineer to own the infrastructure powering our AI agents. You will design, deploy, and operate secure, dedicated AWS environments for each customer, and lead the evolution of the platform with hands-on implementation.

You will drive architecture decisions, build scalable pipelines, and ensure cost-effective, observable systems while mentoring the team in cloud best practices and security.

Qualifications

• Designed and deployed complex production infrastructure on AWS across networking, identity, compute, and data.
• Experience architecting single-tenant platforms and managing fleets of tenant environments at scale.

Responsibilities

• Own the infrastructure behind our agents and build much of it yourself.
• Set direction for platform architecture and document major changes.
• Lead implementation with a high degree of independence.

Skills

AWS platform engineering

Pulumi

Kubernetes/ECS

CI/CD pipelines

Python/Go

Security design (SOC 2)

Cost optimization

Observability

Independent leadership

Tools

Pulumi

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS services

Job description

Company Description

Whirl AI helps Enterprise IT organizations deliver business change faster. Our platform gives enterprise teams AI agents grounded in a deep, continuously updated understanding of how their systems actually work - compressing discovery and documentation from weeks to hours without sacrificing quality or control. We are early-stage, moving fast, and building the team that will define how Enterprise IT operates in the AI era.

Role Description

As our Principal Cloud Engineer, you'll set the direction for the infrastructure behind our agents and build much of it yourself. You'll own how every enterprise customer gets a secure, dedicated environment on AWS, and how we run a growing fleet of those environments without slowing the team down. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role: you'll decide how our platform evolves, and engineering will look to you for infrastructure decisions.

What We Are Looking For

• You have designed and deployed complex production infrastructure on AWS across every layer: networking, identity, compute, and data.
• Experience architecting single‑tenant platforms from the ground up and managing fleets of tenant environments at scale through their whole lifecycle, from provisioning to deletion.
• Expert‑level Pulumi. You have designed and scaled large Pulumi codebases and know the platform in depth, from its core concepts to its wider tooling.
• Experience running containerized workloads (ECS, Kubernetes, or equivalent) and building the CI/CD pipelines that let the rest of engineering ship safely and fast.
• Deep expertise in infrastructure security. You design for isolation, least‑privilege access, and defense in depth. SOC 2 controls are the floor, and we expect skills well beyond them.
• You build infrastructure that is observable, cost‑effective, and performant.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or a similar language, enough to build and maintain the tools your work needs.
• You use AI tools throughout your work to design, build, and operate infrastructure faster.
• Demonstrated experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or DevOps/SRE roles at a functional lead level. Your team has relied on you for its infrastructure decisions.
• A high degree of independence. You lead the evolution of our architecture: design and document major changes, plan the work, delegate where it makes sense, and do the implementation yourself.

Nice to Have

• Production experience with GCP or Azure alongside AWS
• Experience at an early‑stage (seed to Series A) startup, especially having built cloud infrastructure from a small footprint
• Cloud provider certifications (AWS Solutions Architect Professional, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, or Azure equivalents)

Why Join us

• Own meaningful technical decisions at the ground floor of an AI company targeting a massive market
• Work directly with founders and have immediate, visible impact
• Competitive compensation including equity and benefits (100% employer‑paid health plan coverage for employees)

Whirl AI is committed to equal employment opportunity. All hiring decisions are made on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need - never on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We build better products because our team doesn't all think the same way, and we want that to keep being true. Show up as yourself. We can't wait to meet you.