Senior DevOps Engineer

Encord; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Career growth opportunities

4 days/week in-person culture

Learning & development budget

Comprehensive health coverage

Job summary

Encord is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our New York platform engineering team. You will build and operate the core infrastructure, ensuring performance, reliability, observability, and scalability.

You will drive automation and resilient deployment practices across multiple squads. You will own cloud design on GCP/AWS, manage Kubernetes clusters and storage at petabyte scale, and shape release processes with a focus on efficiency and reliability.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE in production environments.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at scale.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) and config management.
• Strong fundamentals in resilient distributed and high-performance systems.
• Kubernetes and containerised workloads in cloud environments (GCP/AWS).
• Networking, OS and database tech foundational knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Own and continuously improve deployment pipelines; partner with developers on infra changes and release processes.
• Design and maintain cloud infra on GCP/AWS; manage Kubernetes clusters, networking, storage at scale.
• Build automation and internal tooling to boost developer productivity and reduce toil.
• Profile and optimize services handling large-scale data pipelines; establish performance benchmarks.
• Define and own SLIs/SLOs/SLAs; build alerts, runbooks, and postmortems with blameless culture.
• Instrument services with tracing, logging and metrics; ensure observability before production.

Skills

DevOps

SRE

Automation

Distributed systems

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

ABOUT US

We're solving AI's hardest problem: alignment.

Encord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ of the world's leading AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, Hitachi, Skydio, AbbVie and Dyna, Walden and Agility Robotics. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to sports and healthcare, we're solving AI's hardest problem: turning complex, real-world data into production-ready intelligent systems.

We're a team of founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and former Olympians, who've helped build some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, and alumni of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial. We've raised $110M from legendary technology investors, early backers of companies like Databricks, ElevenLabs and Vercel, and we're growing at an extraordinary pace.

We're looking for exceptional people who want to help build a category-defining company, operating with high urgency and taking real ownership to help shape the future of AI.

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer with 5+ years of experience to join our growing platform engineering team in New York. You'll be embedded in the teams building and operating Encord's core infrastructure, ensuring our platform is performant, reliable, observable, and scalable. You'll drive a culture of automation, performance, and resilience through individual contributions and collaboration with multiple squads.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• CI/CD & Deployment Own and continuously improve deployment pipelines; partner closely with developers to review infrastructure changes, streamline release processes, and champion DevOps best practices across the engineering group.
• Infrastructure & Cloud Design, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS; manage Kubernetes clusters, networking, and storage at petabyte scale, with infrastructure-as-code as the default.
• Automation & Tooling Drive developer productivity by building, guiding, and reviewing automation and internal tooling efforts across the engineering group; eliminate manual toil wherever it exists.
• Performance & Capacity Profile and optimise services handling large-scale data pipelines; perform capacity planning for storage and compute-intensive workloads. Work with squads to establish performance benchmarks and expectations.
• Reliability & Availability Define and own SLIs/SLOs/SLAs for critical services; build alerting, runbooks, and incident response processes; lead postmortems with a blameless culture.
• Observability Instrument services with distributed tracing, logging, and metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, GCP Dashboards or similar); build infrastructure, define best practices, and work with each squad to ensure every service is observable before it goes to production.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

• 4+ years of hands-on DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE experience in a production environment.
• Strong experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation at scale.
• Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi) and configuration management.
• Strong fundamentals in designing, building, and maintaining resilient distributed and/or high performance systems.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containerised workloads in cloud environments (GCP and/or AWS).
• Solid understanding of networking, operating systems, and database technologies.
• Experience with observability fundamentals metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.

TECH STACK

• We are technology agnostic at Encord and not looking for experience across all of these — as long as you're open to learning, please apply.
• Backend: Python
• Frontend: TypeScript and React
• Deployment: Kubernetes
• Infrastructure: GCP
• Machine learning: PyTorch, CUDA, Ray

WHY ENCORD

• Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
• Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly
• Strong in-person culture: 4 days/week
• Daily team lunches & dinners
• Annual learning & development budget
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• US employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays
• UK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays
• Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe
• Bi-annual company offsites & monthly socials

OPERATING PRINCIPLES

• High agency You see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks.
• Build with care & urgency We bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here.
• Self-aware & hungry We stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long.
• Invent in real time We move toward the ambiguity. We're pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.