Founding DevOps Engineer
Clera · San Francisco
Software EngineeringEngineeringFullTime
Clera is hiring a Founding DevOps Engineer in San Francisco, California (full-time). Posted 17 October 2026. Apply directly on Clera's own careers site — no account needed.
About the Role
As the founding DevOps engineer at a personal AI software company, you'll build and own the operational platform that supports reliable, secure, frequent product releases. You'll work closely with a small engineering team and help establish the infrastructure and practices it will grow on.
What You'll Do
Own cloud infrastructure, networking, databases, and compute, managing environments through infrastructure as code.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, gated tests, preview environments, feature flags, and rapid rollback tooling.
Design and operate logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting systems that help identify issues early.
Establish on-call rotations, runbooks, and incident response practices, and lead postmortems that drive improvements.
Implement security controls including secrets management, least-privilege access, vulnerability scanning, and audit logging.
Track service costs and capacity, plan for traffic growth, and reduce infrastructure waste.
Set platform standards and help hire and onboard future infrastructure engineers while staying hands-on.
What We're Looking For
At least 4 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including production on-call work.
Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform, infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, containers, and orchestration.
A track record of building CI/CD and deployment tooling that supports frequent, reliable releases.
Experience with observability, incident response, postmortems, cloud accounts, networking, databases, and compute.
Strong security fundamentals, including IAM, network boundaries, secrets management, and compliance work such as SOC 2.
Ability to write TypeScript or Python and read application code, with experience verifying and owning code developed using AI-assisted tools.
Experience leading a growing engineering team while remaining technically involved, and hiring or onboarding infrastructure engineers.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, California.
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