Senior / Lead Infrastructure & Operations Engineer

Austin Werner; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Austin Werner is seeking a Senior / Lead Infrastructure & Operations Engineer for an AI startup. You’ll own the platform from commit to production, shaping CI/CD pipelines across GCP and specialist GPU providers.

You will design networks, manage multi-account cloud estate as code, and lead incidents with automation to reduce toil, building self‑service tooling and paved road environments.

This foundational role requires hands-on, security-conscious engineers who can operate across clouds.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and operating production infrastructure at engineering‑driven companies
• Deep fluency with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), CI/CD systems, Kubernetes, and at least one major cloud (GCP preferred; AWS acceptable)
• Hands-on experience running multi-account cloud estates as code across providers

Responsibilities

• Own end‑to‑end CI/CD pipelines, environments, and gated promotions
• Manage cloud estate as code across GCP and specialist GPU providers, including IAM and provisioning
• Design and operate underlying network: VPCs/subnets, interconnects, DNS, and cross‑cloud failover
• Make onboarding repeatable with environments, docs‑as‑code, and sensible defaults
• Lead incidents and reduce toil with self‑service tooling

Skills

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms (GCP)

Multi-cloud networking

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

GCP

AWS

Job description

Senior / Lead Infrastructure & Operations Engineer - (AI Startup)

We’re partnering with a well‑funded, stealth‑stage AI startup at the intersection of frontier AI research and fundamental physics. They’re building AI systems that can discover new physics at scale.

This is a foundational infrastructure role: you’ll own the platform every other engineering team ships through.

The Opportunity

Our client is looking for a senior infrastructure engineer to own the path from commit to production for a codebase where most commits are written by AI agents. Human review doesn’t scale at that velocity; CI does. What CI enforces is the architecture.

You’ll decide what CI enforces and build it, across a cloud estate spanning GCP and specialist GPU providers, on a network you design and a failover you rehearse. This is being built from a thin starting point, not inherited from a mature platform.

What You’ll Do as Senior / Lead Infrastructure & Operations Engineer

• Own end‑to‑end CI/CD: pipelines, staged environments, promotion with real gates. The artifact that passes tests is the artifact that runs.
• Run the cloud estate as code across GCP and specialist GPU providers: org structure, IAM, quotas, and provisioning so engineers don’t file tickets for basic needs. Repo and permission management counts as infrastructure here.
• Design and operate the underlying network: VPCs/subnets across providers, interconnects, DNS, and cross‑cloud failover that is actually rehearsed.
• Make onboarding a system: treat time‑to‑productivity as an infrastructure property. Build the “paved road” with environments, docs‑as‑code, and defaults that make the right thing the easy thing.
• Lead incidents and reduce toil with code, preferring self‑service abstractions over tickets.

What You’ll Bring as Senior / Lead Infrastructure & Operations Engineer

• 5+ years building and operating production infrastructure at companies known for engineering rigor (e.g., Stripe, Cloudflare, Datadog, Snowflake, Databricks, Google, Netflix, or comparable).
• Deep fluency with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar), CI/CD systems, Kubernetes, and at least one major cloud (GCP preferred; AWS acceptable).
• Experience building CI/CD from 0→1, not just maintaining a mature system. You can explain mechanically how you’d cut a build or registry bill; container build and registry economics are something you reason about before they show up on an invoice.
• Hands‑on experience running a multi‑account cloud estate as code, ideally with multi‑cloud networking and a rehearsed failover.
• A track record of leading incidents and systematically reducing toil with automation and self‑service platforms.

Nice to Have

• Built CI/CD or release engineering from scratch at a fast‑growing company.
• Strong FinOps instinct: cloud cost at account and architecture level (commitments, egress, idle spend, unit economics).
• Experience with specialist GPU‑cloud providers (e.g., Modal, CoreWeave, or equivalents) and the account/quota/network realities of running across them alongside a major cloud.
• Production observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar.
• Experience supporting machine‑generated or unusually high‑velocity commit patterns.