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Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

YC-backed AI startup in consumer finance, building speech AI agents for financial institutions, reaching 8-figure ARR in less than 2 years.
$200,000 - $300,000
DevOps
Staff Software Engineer
In-Person
11 - 50 Employees
6+ years of experience
AI · Finance
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Description For Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Salient is a rapidly growing YC-backed AI startup revolutionizing consumer finance through voice AI technology. Having achieved remarkable success with 8-figure ARR in under two years, they're now seeking a Staff/Principal Infrastructure Engineer to join their 19-person team in San Francisco.

The role offers an exciting opportunity to architect and build scalable, production-grade infrastructure for enterprise and major financial institutions. As the Infrastructure Engineer, you'll lead the transition to a Kubernetes-based architecture, owning crucial aspects of deployment pipelines, observability systems, and cloud infrastructure. The position demands someone who can work independently and shape technical direction while building systems that scale.

The company has impressive backing, including the largest Series A for a B2B startup from a16z, and has achieved significant market penetration with their AI agent handling millions of real customer calls daily. Their mission to pass the Turing test for conversational speech in telephony settings puts them at the cutting edge of AI technology.

Working at Salient means joining a high-intensity environment where your work directly impacts major financial institutions. The role requires 4 days per week in-person attendance at their San Francisco office, emphasizing close collaboration with product, engineering, and leadership teams. You'll have significant autonomy and the opportunity to shape the infrastructure of a rapidly scaling AI platform.

The compensation package includes a competitive salary range of $200K-$300K plus equity, reflecting the senior nature of the role and the company's commitment to attracting top talent. This is an ideal opportunity for an experienced infrastructure engineer who wants to be at the forefront of AI technology while building critical systems that scale.

Last updated 12 days ago

Responsibilities For Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

  • Architect and implement scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure for real-time AI-driven voice services
  • Support and drive migration to Kubernetes (from ECS) and establish infrastructure best practices
  • Build, optimize, and maintain CI/CD pipelines
  • Own monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems
  • Be the primary PoC for on-call responsibilities
  • Automate operational workflows and infrastructure provisioning
  • Collaborate with engineering teams to debug live issues and improve system resilience

Requirements For Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Python
Go
Kubernetes
  • 6+ years of deep infrastructure engineering experience
  • Deep expertise in AWS cloud environments
  • Strong experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker & Kubernetes)
  • Strong awareness of networking concepts in AWS
  • Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Helm)
  • Strong software engineering skills in Python or Go, and Bash
  • Experience designing monitoring and alerting systems
  • Strong understanding of security, reliability, and scaling best practices
  • Hands-on, ownership-driven mindset
  • Ability to work 4 days a week in person from San Francisco office

Benefits For Staff / Principal Infrastructure Engineer

Equity
  • Equity compensation
  • Opportunity to work at a fast-growing AI startup
  • Collaborative work environment