# Staff Infrastructure Engineer

**Company:** [Salient](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/salient)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** DevOps / SRE
**Salary:** $200k – $300k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Infrastructure As Code, Distributed Systems, Observability, SLOs, IAM, Cost Optimization
**Posted:** 2026-03-19

> Staff Infrastructure Engineer architects and owns scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) powering AI-driven financial operations, optimizes GPU workloads, drives reliability via SLOs and monitoring, and enhances developer velocity through CI/CD and platform tools. Requires 5+ years experience with distributed systems.

## Job Description

## What You'll Do
- Lead architectural decisions and technical reviews for infrastructure-critical initiatives.
- Design, build, and own the cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) that runs Salient - from compute and networking to storage and observability.
- Develop scalable harnesses that enable coding agents to operate reliably without compromising system stability or code quality.
- Partner closely with the modeling team to optimize the serving and performance of GPU-intensive workloads.
- Drive reliability and performance across the stack by defining SLOs, building robust monitoring and alerting, and leading incident response and postmortems.
- Own developer platform investments that materially improve engineering velocity, including CI/CD, deployment tooling, environments, and internal infrastructure abstractions.
- Establish infrastructure best practices, patterns, and standards as a technical authority across the engineering org.
- Identify and reduce technical debt across infrastructure systems, with a focus on long-term scalability and operational health.

## What You'll Bring
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years at the senior or staff level in infrastructure/platform roles, working on large-scale distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in cloud platforms (**AWS** or **GCP**) - compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost optimization.
- Expert in infrastructure-as-code, with a strong track record of building scalable automation systems.
- Extensive experience owning and scaling **Kubernetes** and **CI/CD** systems in high-throughput, production environments.
- Track record of building and operating high-availability, high-throughput distributed systems with mature observability practices.
- Strong technical communication - able to document architecture clearly and influence engineering decisions across teams.

## Nice to Have
- Background in security.
- Exposure to serving AI/ML workloads.
- Combination of big tech and startup experience.

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/7030db14-8fb0-48d0-902d-5985b904f260
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