Infrastructure engineer

Writer
Seattle; San Francisco, US
Hybrid

Who this role is best for

Best suited to mid-level infrastructure engineers experienced with AI tooling in daily workflows and hybrid work arrangements in major tech hubs.

Best fit for

  • Engineers who integrate AI agents into their daily debugging and coding workflows.
    β€” β€œAI is part of how you ship, not a thing you've read about”
  • Candidates comfortable with rotating focus across SRE, DevOps, and infrastructure projects quarterly.
    β€” β€œmove between SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Platform work over a quarter or two”
  • Professionals who prioritize automating manual processes over staffing them.
    β€” β€œtreat manual on-call work as a defect to be designed out”

Things to consider

  • Hybrid work requires presence in NYC, SF, Seattle, or London hubs.
    β€” β€œThis is a hybrid position, based out of our New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, or London hubs”
  • Daily AI tool usage is a hard requirement, not just familiarity.
    β€” β€œThis is a hard requirement, not a bonus”

How to stand out

  • Document specific examples of AI tooling you've implemented in past roles.
    β€” β€œyou've built or adopted AI-assisted workflows others now use”
  • Highlight projects where you reduced operational toil through automation.
    β€” β€œautomate operational tasks and infrastructure management with Python or Go”
  • Prepare case studies of complex outages you diagnosed beyond surface symptoms.
    β€” β€œtrace failures to the underlying problem (never the symptom)”
Pace Β· Fast PacedCollaboration Β· HighAutonomy Β· MediumDecision Impact Β· TeamLevel Β· Senior

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

What success looks like

  • Build resilient systems
  • Automate operational tasks
  • Champion reliability best practices
Typical background
Infrastructure engineeringDevOpsSRE

Skills & requirements

Required

AWSGCPAzureKubernetesHelmTerraformPythonGoSREDevOps

Preferred

AILLM

Stack & domain

PythonGoAWSGCPAzureKubernetesHelmTerraformLeadershipProblem-solvingCommunicationItEnterpriseAIObservability

About the role

Original posting from Writer via Ashby

πŸš€ About WRITER

WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI.

Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI.

πŸ“ About the role

At WRITER, our mission to expand human capacity with superintelligence relies on a foundational truth: our platform must be available, performant, and reliable, 24/7. As an Infrastructure engineer, you'll be at the heart of making this a reality, impacting every enterprise customer who trusts us with their AI-powered workflows. This isn't just about keeping the lights on; it's about pushing the boundaries of what's possible, proactively identifying and solving complex systemic challenges, and laying the groundwork for our rapid growth and the evolving demands of enterprise generative AI. You'll build resilient systems, automate across the stack, and champion reliability best practices, directly enabling our ambitious product roadmap and ensuring our customers always have access to the powerful tools they need.

This is a hybrid position, based out of our New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, or London hubs. You'll report to our director of engineering.

πŸ¦ΈπŸ»β€β™€οΈ What you'll do

Technical

  • Breadth across disciplines. Bring deep focus to one problem at a time, with the breadth to move between SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Platform work over a quarter or two as the leverage shifts. This is not a thrash-every-week role β€” most of the time you're heads-down on one substantial initiative (the on-call posture, the release pipeline, the multi-region Terraform layout, the internal platform surface). Cross-layer fluency is what lets you pick the right next initiative; it isn't a weekly context-switch.
  • Simplicity / via negativa. Challenge the status quo and remove toil before adding features β€” automate operational tasks and infrastructure management with Python or Go, reject tools that don't fit the problem, and treat manual on-call work as a defect to be designed out, not a status quo to be staffed up.
  • Breadth across the stack. Design scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure across AWS (preferred), GCP, and Azure, working fluently across Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and the supporting cloud and AI tooling that backs WRITER's high-traffic platform.
  • AI in workflow. Run agents in your daily loop β€” Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills β€” to investigate incidents, draft Terraform / Helm changes, write runbooks, scaffold tooling, and review PRs. Build the agentic setup as a collective surface: humans and digital teammates working as one team, with shared skills, shared context, and shared on-call workflows. Encode recurring infra tasks as internal skills any teammate (human or agent) can pick up and run, so the team's throughput compounds β€” not just your own.
  • Debugging fluency. Lead incident response, post-mortems, and root-cause analyses β€” trace failures to the underlying problem (never the symptom), apply the learning back into the architecture, and prevent the same incident from happening twice.

Non-technical

  • End-to-end ownership. Own the reliability, performance, and efficiency of WRITER's core services end-to-end β€” define and uphold the SLOs and error budgets, carry the on-call pager, and stand behind the outcome metric, not just the system you shipped.
  • Strategic vs. tactical balance. Balance this week's critical work with the 6–12-month platform direction β€” ship the on-call-driving fix today while shaping the multi-year observability, cost, and reliability investments that move WRITER's enterprise customers.
  • Cross-functional collaboration. Operate at the seams with product, security, and engineering peers β€” provide expert guidance on system design for reliability, performance, and scalability from conception through launch, Connect the infra agenda to product and revenue context, and disagree with evidence, not volume.

⭐️ What you need

Technical

  • Track record. 5+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or a similar role focused on building and operating large-scale, high-availability production systems at a high-growth product company.
  • Breadth. Experience running containerisation in production (a real cluster, not a lab), with experience in Helm and Terraform or Pulumi on at least one major cloud (AWS preferred), plus good proficiency in Python or Go for automation and tooling.
  • AI in workflow. AI is part of how you ship, not a thing you've read about β€” agentic tooling (Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills) is in your daily loop, you've built or adopted AI-assisted workflows others now use, and you have strong opinions on where it's unreliable. This is a hard requirement, not a bonus. Candidates whose actual daily workflow does not already include AI tooling will not be advanced.
  • First-principles + decision-making. Demonstrated ability to Challenge the status quo, proactively identify systemic weaknesses, and propose innovative solutions to complex reliability problems β€” reason from constraints and failure modes (not analogy or vendor defaults), name the tradeoff in business terms (reliability vs. velocity, cost vs. blast radius, standardisation vs. one-off), and reject the "best practices" answer when it doesn't fit the problem.
  • Reversibility & blast-radius. Make reversible calls by default β€” write the rollback before you touch production, work fluently with monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or equivalent), and stress the system in safe places so it comes back stronger.

Non-technical

  • Cross-functional collaboration. Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, with a talent for building strong relationships and Connecting with cross-functional teams β€” surface non-goals before anyone asks, and partner with product, security, and platform peers as one delivery surface.
  • Autonomy & end-to-end ownership. A strong sense of ownership and accountability, eager to Own mission-critical systems and drive them toward peak performance and unparalleled reliability. At least one 0-to-1 infrastructure build you owned end-to-end, with the outcome metric attached.

🎁 Bonus if you have

  • Software-engineering depth. A software-engineering background, not only config and scripting β€” you've designed, built, and shipped non-trivial production code (services, libraries, internal frameworks) in Python, Go, or a comparable language, you can read and modify the codebases your infrastructure runs, and you move between infra automation and feature engineering without changing brains.

🍩 Benefits & perks (US Full-time employees)

  • Generous PTO, plus company holidays
  • Medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
  • Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks)
  • Fertility and family planning support
  • Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri https://www.galleri.com/partner/writer
  • Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options
  • Health savings account for eligible plans with company contribution
  • Annual work-life stipends for:
  • Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal tr

Source: Writer careers (Ashby)

Similar roles