Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Genius AI (HearstLab); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Genius AI in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to design and build a standardized, automated software factory. You will own CI/CD tooling, write designs, and mentor engineers while partnering with product teams to ship code daily.

The role emphasizes hands-on work with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitOps, delivering reliable platform capabilities and affordable incident response across the stack.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience with infrastructure, platform, or developer experience.
• Hands-on with AWS and Kubernetes in production.
• Fluent with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps-style delivery (ArgoCD).
• Experience designing CI/CD at scale, including pipeline standardization, self-hosted runners, build caching, progressive delivery, and safe rollbacks.
• Strong observability and reliability instincts, defining SLOs and improving alerting.

Responsibilities

• Scale the CI platform as the orchestration layer for the software factory.
• Build systems that allow engineers to deploy without worry.
• Design guardrails, validation, and auto-approval paths for safe infrastructure as code changes by product engineers.
• Develop tools and access for engineers and AI agents to investigate and resolve incidents across app, service, compute, storage, and network layers without Infra intervention.
• Own SLOs, codify monitoring in Terraform, and eliminate noisy or ineffective monitors.
• Write technical designs, review complex changes, and mentor engineers, setting the platform’s technical direction.

Skills

Staff-level ownership

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitOps

CI/CD at scale

Observability

Incident response

Software engineering

Platform engineering

Tools

ArgoCD

Job description

Genius AI is seeking a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to help design and build a standardized, automated, and fault-tolerant software factory, enabling both humans and AI agents to ship code daily. This hands-on, staff-level IC role on the Infrastructure team will focus on building, verifying, deploying, and operating software, as well as developing internal SRE products for engineering teams. You will treat CI pipelines, deploy tooling, and alerting as products, with engineering as your customers, and measure success by how much faster and safer every team ships.

Responsibilities will include:

• Scale the CI platform as the orchestration layer for the software factory
• Build systems that allow engineers to deploy without worry
• Design guardrails, validation, and auto-approval paths for safe infrastructure as code changes by product engineers
• Develop tools and access for engineers and AI agents to investigate and resolve incidents across app, service, compute, storage, and network layers without Infra intervention
• Own SLOs, codify monitoring in Terraform, and eliminate noisy or ineffective monitors
• Write technical designs, review complex changes, and mentor engineers, setting the platform’s technical direction

You’re a great fit if you:

• Have 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with several years focused on infrastructure, platform, or developer experience
• Demonstrate staff-level ownership, having set technical direction for platforms or build/deploy systems with measurable improvements in velocity or reliability
• Have deep hands-on experience with a major public cloud (AWS preferred) and Kubernetes in production
• Are fluent with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps-style delivery (ArgoCD or similar)
• Have real experience designing CI/CD at scale, including pipeline standardization, self-hosted runners, build caching, progressive delivery, and safe rollbacks
• Possess strong observability and reliability instincts, having defined SLOs, improved alerting, and implemented systemic fixes post-incident
• Approach internal tooling with a product mindset, measuring success by adoption and reduced Infra support requests
• Have integrated AI tooling into your development workflow and have opinions on agent roles in build, deploy, and operations
• Have experience at a high-growth startup or small, high-leverage platform team, shipping quickly and working through ambiguity

Genius AI is committed to creating a supportive and empowering workplace for all employees and is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.