Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Sierra; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Life insurance and disability benefits

Retirement plan (country dependent)

Parental leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Lunch and snacks

Discretionary benefit stipend

Free alphorn lessons

Job summary

Sierra in San Francisco is seeking a Software Engineer, Infrastructure to design, build, and maintain the core systems behind our AI platform. You will focus on reliability, scalability, and security to empower product teams with speed and confidence.

Work with AWS/GCP/Azure, IaC (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, distributed systems, and observability tools to drive production SaaS readiness and strong incident response capabilities.

Qualifications

• 5–7+ years of hands-on development experience in highly technical products.
• Strong automation mindset and ability to design maintainable systems.
• Proven experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• CI/CD experience and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with observability tools and incident response in production.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain core systems that power Sierra's AI platform.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and security of infrastructure.
• Build and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform for scalable environments.
• Own CI/CD pipelines and release management for fast, reliable deployments.
• Architect distributed systems with databases, retrievals, and ML models.
• Develop data serving abstractions and authentication features (SSO, RBAC).
• Integrate Sierra stack with enterprise environments and improve observability.
• Lead incident management and postmortems to improve resilience.

Skills

5–7+ years

Automation & tooling

Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Infrastructure as code (Terraform)

CI/CD systems & release management

Docker & Kubernetes

Observability tools (Prometheus, Graf"

Education

Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

Job description

About us

At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such as SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google’s earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

What you’ll do

As a Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Sierra, you will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the core systems that make our AI platform possible. You’ll focus on making Sierra’s infrastructure secure, reliable, and scalable, enabling product teams to deliver with speed and confidence.

• Ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of our platform and LLM inference serving as we rapidly grow traffic.
• Build and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform to ensure scalable, secure, and reproducible environments.
• Create and maintain a self-serve infrastructure platform that enables the rest of engineering to deploy and operate services.
• Own and evolve CI/CD pipelines and release management, enabling fast, reliable deployments for Sierra’s platform.
• Architect and operate distributed systems that leverage distributed databases, retrieval systems, and ML models.
• Develop and maintain core data serving abstractions along with authentication and security features (SSO, RBAC, authentication controls).
• Navigate and integrate our stack with enterprise customer environments in scalable and maintainable ways.
• Enhance observability tooling (metrics, logging, tracing) to provide deep visibility into platform health and performance.
• Lead and participate in incident management, improving system resilience through proactive monitoring, root cause analysis, and postmortems.

What you’ll bring

• Strong software engineering background with 5–7+ years of hands‑on development experience in highly technical products.
• A strong inclination towards building automation, tooling, and platform, along with designing maintainable systems.
• Proven experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred).
• Hands‑on expertise in CI/CD systems, release management, and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Experience in incident response and operating distributed systems in production.
• Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience

Even better…

• Production experience working with LLMs and machine learning models.
• Background in distributed systems, running SaaS services at scale, and agentic architecture.
• Familiarity with security and authentication protocols (OAuth, SSO, mTLS).
• Previous experience in a fast‑paced startup environment or platform/infra‑focused team.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.
• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.
• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self‑reflect to continuously self‑improve.
• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full‑time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
• Parental leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full‑time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.