Founding DevOps Engineer

Clera

San Francisco, CA

On-site

Who this role is best for

Geared toward technically hands-on engineers comfortable with infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipeline design, who are also experienced in leading small teams and managing on-call responsibilities in San Francisco.

Best fit for

Candidates with 4+ years of DevOps or SRE experience and a history of building CI/CD tooling for frequent releases
— “A track record of building CI/CD and deployment tooling that supports frequent, reliable releases.”
Individuals who have led or mentored infrastructure engineers while staying technically engaged
— “Experience leading a growing engineering team while remaining technically involved, and hiring or onboarding infrastructure engineers.”
Engineers with cloud infrastructure expertise and strong security fundamentals, particularly in IAM and compliance
— “Strong security fundamentals, including IAM, network boundaries, secrets management, and compliance work such as SOC 2.”

Things to consider

On-site presence in San Francisco is mandatory, with no visa sponsorship available
— “Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.”
The role demands ownership of cloud environments and a high level of technical involvement in team growth
— “Set platform standards and help hire and onboard future infrastructure engineers while staying hands-on.”

How to stand out

Emphasize your hands-on infrastructure as code experience with specific cloud platforms and tools
— “Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi”
Showcase your leadership in incident response and postmortems that drive operational improvements
— “Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response practices, and lead postmortems that drive improvements.”
Demonstrate your understanding of observability systems and their role in proactive issue detection
— “Design and operate logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting systems that help identify issues early.”
Include examples of security implementations like secrets management and least-privilege access in your portfolio
— “Implement security controls including secrets management, least-privilege access, vulnerability scanning, and audit logging.”

Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, managing environments through infrastructure as code
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollback tooling
Design and operate logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting systems
Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response practices
Implement security controls including secrets management, least-privilege access, vulnerability scanning, and audit logging

Typical background

4+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineeringProduction on-call work experience

Skills & requirements

Required

Cloud InfrastructureNetworkingDatabasesComputeInfrastructure As CodeCi/cd PipelinesObservabilityIncident ResponseSecurity ControlsService CostsCapacity PlanningPlatform StandardsHiring And Onboarding

Preferred

TypeScriptPythonAi-assisted Tools

Stack & domain

DevOpsSRECloud InfrastructureNetworkingDatabasesComputeInfrastructure As CodeTerraformPulumiContainersOrchestrationObservabilityIncident ResponsePostmortemsCloud AccountsTypeScriptPythonAi-assisted Tools

About the role

Original posting from Clera via Ashby

ABOUT THE ROLE
As the founding DevOps engineer at a personal AI software company, you'll build and own the operational platform that supports reliable, secure, frequent product releases. You'll work closely with a small engineering team and help establish the infrastructure and practices it will grow on.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, managing environments through infrastructure as code.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollback tooling.
Design and operate logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting systems that help identify issues early.
Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response practices, and lead postmortems that drive improvements.
Implement security controls including secrets management, least-privilege access, vulnerability scanning, and audit logging.
Track service costs and capacity, plan for traffic growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.
Set platform standards and help hire and onboard future infrastructure engineers while staying hands-on.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
At least 4 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including production on-call work.
Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.
A track record of building CI/CD and deployment tooling that supports frequent, reliable releases.
Experience with observability, incident response, postmortems, cloud accounts, networking, databases, and compute.
Strong security fundamentals, including IAM, network boundaries, secrets management, and compliance work such as SOC 2.
Ability to write TypeScript or Python and read application code, with experience verifying and owning code developed using AI-assisted tools.
Experience leading a growing engineering team while remaining technically involved, and hiring or onboarding infrastructure engineers.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.

Source: Clera careers (Ashby)