Founding DevOps Engineer

The Company

We’re building a web-based AI app builder that lets non-technical users create and deploy real applications without writing code. Our users expect things to “just work”—which means the platform underneath must be fast, reliable, and invisible.

We’re an early-stage, YC startup building a small, high-ownership founding team.

The Role

We’re hiring a Founding DevOps Engineer to own infrastructure, reliability, and operational excellence from day one. This is a staff-level role with architectural authority and long-term impact.

You’ll design systems that support AI-powered workloads, rapid iteration, and a product where non-technical users never think about infrastructure—yet can get instant help when something goes wrong.

Human-in-the-Loop Infrastructure (What Makes This Role Unique)

A core differentiator of our product is a human-in-the-loop marketplace.

When a user’s app breaks or behaves unexpectedly, a vetted human developer can instantly jump into that user’s running VM, diagnose the issue, and fix it in real time—often before the user even understands what went wrong.

As a founding DevOps engineer, you will:

• Design secure, auditable VM access for third-party human developers
• Build fast, safe workflows for live debugging and remediation
• Integrate deep observability so humans can act with full context
• Ensure isolation, permissions, and trust boundaries are rock-solid

This system is powered by strong observability and tooling, including Sentry-style error tracking, logging, metrics, and traces that tie user-visible issues directly to infrastructure and code.

What You’ll Do

• Own production infrastructure, deployments, and reliability
• Architect scalable systems for a high-growth AI web platform
• Design CI/CD pipelines that optimize for safety and speed
• Operate and scale VM-based workloads
• Build observability that reflects real user impact (errors, latency, failures)
• Lead incident response, postmortems, and long-term reliability improvements
• Set standards for security, backups, disaster recovery, and performance
• Work closely with product engineers to reduce operational complexity
• Help define engineering culture and best practices as the team grows

Tech Stack

• TypeScript, React
• Django
• PostgreSQL
• Fly.io** (VM-based deployments)**
• Google Cloud Platform
• Cloudflare
• Nginx
• VSCode Web
• Observability: Sentry-style error tracking, logs, metrics, tracing

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering
• Proven ownership of production systems at scale
• Strong Linux, networking, and web infrastructure fundamentals
• Experience running PostgreSQL in production
• Cloud experience (GCP preferred)
• Comfort designing secure systems with live access and trust boundaries
• Product-oriented mindset for non-technical users
• Ability to make architectural decisions in ambiguous, early-stage environments
• Clear communicator who can explain complex systems simply

Nice to Have

• Founding or early-stage startup experience
• Backend engineering background (especially Django)
• Experience with Cloudflare, edge platforms, or AI workloads
• Experience designing internal tooling or support platforms

Why Join

• Founding engineer role with deep ownership and influence
• Build a genuinely differentiated AI product
• Solve hard infrastructure problems with real user impact
• Close collaboration with founders
• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Shape the technical foundation from day one