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