Senior DevOps Engineer

Encord; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary + equity

Growth opportunities

4 days/week in-person

Team lunches & dinners

Learning & development budget

Health, dental, and vision coverage

US 18 vacation days + holidays

Travel opportunities across US/UK/EU

Bi-annual offsites & monthly socials

Job summary

Encord is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our platform engineering team in New York. You will own deployment pipelines, design cloud infrastructure on GCP/AWS, and drive automation and reliability across the stack.

You will work on performance, capacity planning, and observability, building scalable systems with Kubernetes and modern tooling. We value initiative and collaboration in a fast-paced, high-ownership environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE in production.
• Strong experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines at scale.
• Proficient with IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi) and config management.
• Solid design of resilient distributed and high‑performance systems.
• Hands-on Kubernetes in cloud environments (GCP/AWS).
• Networking, OS, and database fundamentals.
• Observability fundamentals: metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve deployment pipelines; champion DevOps practices across engineering.
• Design, deploy, and maintain cloud infra on GCP/AWS; manage Kubernetes clusters.
• Build automation and internal tooling; reduce manual toil across teams.
• Profile and optimize services; perform capacity planning with squads.
• Define and own SLIs/SLOs/SLAs; create runbooks and lead blameless postmortems.
• Instrument services with tracing, logging, and metrics; ensure observability before prod.

Skills

CI/CD pipelines

Kubernetes

IaC tools

Cloud platforms

Observability

Networking basics

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

AWS

GCP

Python

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,

  • 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.

If you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.