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Job Title: Founding Production Systems Engineer
Location | On-Site — San Francisco, CA
Time Zone | PST
Role Overview:
We are seeking a Founding Production Systems Engineer to join an early-stage AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, working toward a bigger vision of making video generation as fast, cheap, and programmable as text is today. As one of the first engineering hires, you will keep the product's core systems reliable and scalable as usage grows — debugging ambiguous production issues, improving observability, and making sure the system runs smoothly and cost-effectively over time.
Key Responsibilities:
Improve reliability of job execution, queueing behavior, and failure recovery
Build monitoring, alerting, and incident-response workflows suited for an early but serious production system
Design systems that scale expensive workflows without hurting speed or predictability
Improve cost efficiency across compute, storage, and third-party services
Build internal tools that simplify debugging and system operations for the team
Partner with the broader team to align product needs with robust technical solutions
Required Qualifications:
Experience operating production infrastructure or high-throughput backend systems
Strong debugging skills across services, networking, storage, and cloud environments
Familiarity with queues, object storage, databases, and observability tooling
Comfortable owning ambiguous reliability problems without a predefined root cause
Practical judgment about when to automate, simplify, or build minimal robust solutions
Comfortable using AI tools to increase speed, while relying on personal judgment to solve problems
Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience clearly communicating tradeoffs to non-infrastructure engineers
Track record of owning outcomes independently, not just executing tickets
Comfortable making infrastructure decisions with limited oversight
Tools & Technology:
Queueing systems and object storage
Databases and observability tooling
Cloud infrastructure and deployment automation
AI-assisted development tools
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