Founding Engineer

Role overview A founding engineering position at a consultancy that partners with startups to take software from proof of concept through production scale. The work spans cloud and AI infrastructure, reliability, security, and migrations, owned end to end rather than handed off mid-stream. The founding remit is real: the engineer shapes the internal platform that every client engagement is built on, owns systems from architecture through on-call, and treats documentation and handover as first-class deliverables.

Responsibilities - Build the platform a client's product runs on, including clusters, deployment paths, environments, and the glue that makes a handover survivable. - Design CI/CD pipelines with supply-chain hygiene baked in: signed images, SBOMs, scanned dependencies, GitOps with Argo CD or Flux, and Helm-based releases. - Build observability that answers questions rather than fills dashboards, using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, structured logs, and meaningful SLOs. - Stand up the infrastructure behind AI workloads, including inference serving, GPU scheduling, vector stores, evaluation pipelines, and agent runtimes. - Implement controls that hold up to SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits without last-minute scrambles, including IAM, networking, tenancy boundaries, and secrets handling. - Move up and down the stack as needed, from frontend or API fixes that unblock a release to Linux and networking-level debugging when production incidents don't respect abstraction boundaries.

Requirements - Strong, idiomatic Go for services, operators, controllers, internal CLIs, and deployment tooling, not just reading code. - Real Kubernetes depth beyond surface usage: scheduling, networking, RBAC, CRDs, and node-level failure behaviour, across managed (EKS/GKE/AKS), on-premise, multi-cloud, and air-gapped environments. - Terraform (or equivalent IaC) used by default, with environments reproducible from an empty account. - Fluency across AWS, GCP, and Azure, deep in one and productive in the other two, including pipelines, releases, IAM, networking, and cost. - A track record of running something in production and carrying the pager for it, with full-stack debugging range rather than siloed concerns. - Clear writing: design docs and runbooks are half the deliverable. - Comfort working remotely with startups across time zones, deciding without meetings, writing things down, and being reachable when it counts. - A proof-of-work artifact is required in place of a CV: a repo, a cluster you've run, or something shipped that real people depend on.

Nice to have - MLOps or LLM/agentic systems in production, ideally with evaluation sets. - Rust, Python, or eBPF-level performance and observability work. - Multi-tenant SaaS platform experience or having been through a compliance audit. - Open-source contributions in the cloud-native ecosystem. - Early-stage startup experience as a founding team member, first engineer, or founder of something that shipped.

Benefits and work setup - Fully remote collaboration with startups across time zones, with an emphasis on written async work and being reachable when it matters. - Years of experience and degrees are explicitly not considered; the hiring bar is based on what you can show and build.