Company: Voice AI (YC W21) | Founding Senior Platform Engineer (DevOps)
Location: San Francisco, CA (In-office)
Remuneration: $150k-$300k + Equity 0.10% to 0.60%
Employment Type: Full-time
At Dynamism.io, we are excited to partner with a YC-backed voice AI startup to help them find a Founding Senior Platform Engineer (Backend). This role is ideal for engineers with a strong background in infrastructure or DevOps, who are passionate about scaling distributed systems. As a foundational team member, this engineer will play a crucial role in building out the startup’s real-time voice AI infrastructure.
About the Startup:
The voice AI company, a YC W21-backed startup, is building the "Retool for Voice AI," empowering developers to integrate voice technology across industries. As Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini onboard 4 billion people to human-like voice assistants, this platform bridges the gap between raw models and production-ready voice applications. From SaaS and logistics to telehealth, the company is preparing businesses for the voice-driven future. Since launching in March, the startup has quickly scaled revenue and recently raised a Series A from a top-tier firm. As one of the first 10 hires, the Founding Senior Platform Engineer will join the in-office team in San Francisco to further scale the product and infrastructure.
Role Overview
The Founding Senior Platform Engineer will be responsible for scaling the startup's real-time conversational infrastructure, ensuring millions of concurrent calls are handled with 99.9% reliability and picked up within 1 second. The role involves full ownership of infrastructure scalability projects, as well as designing systems that are resilient and future-proof.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead end-to-end scalability projects, ensuring the infrastructure can handle millions of users while maintaining high availability.
- Build and implement robust monitoring systems to ensure real-time insights into system performance and reliability (e.g., Prometheus).
- Develop and execute anti-fragility measures, ensuring the infrastructure can recover and adapt in the face of unexpected issues (e.g., multi-cluster rollovers).
- Collaborate closely with the founding team to define and optimize infrastructure, improving reliability and scalability.
Core Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience in software engineering, focusing on infrastructure or DevOps roles.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience working with distributed systems and scaling infrastructure.
- 1+ years of experience at a startup with <100 employees, ideally with exposure to fast-scaling environments and ownership of critical systems.
- Proficiency in Kubernetes and Pulumi for managing infrastructure, with experience in Terraform preferred.
- A track record of building scalable systems from scratch and leading projects that ensure high availability.
- Hands-on coding experience with infrastructure and container management systems.
- Strong understanding of networking principles, multi-cluster setups, and observability.
- Ability to work in a fast-paced startup environment, driving features from ideation to completion while continuously iterating on infrastructure improvements.
Ideal Candidate:
- Previous founding experience or deep involvement in early-stage startups, particularly in infrastructure or DevOps roles.
- Experience working at early-stage infrastructure companies like Mux, Render, Supabase, Datadog, Snowflake, or Databricks.
- Familiarity with Rust or Go and a passion for cutting-edge technologies.
- A hacker mindset—always seeking innovative solutions to complex technical challenges, with a focus on improving infrastructure efficiency and reliability.
- Proven ability to refactor and simplify legacy systems for performance improvements and easier maintenance.
- Experience with networking security, certificates, and multi-cluster environments.
- A strong portfolio of system engineering work, with contributions to open-source projects or a well-maintained GitHub profile.
What the Startup Offers:
- Salary: Competitive, ranging from $180k to $300k.
- Equity: Meaningful ownership, ranging from 0.10% to 0.60%.
- Location: San Francisco, full-time, in-office.
- Opportunity: Join an early-stage startup and work closely with the founding team to scale the future of real-time voice AI infrastructure. High-impact role with significant opportunities to shape the company's infrastructure and technical direction.
Key Milestones:
- First 7 days: Ship a pre-scoped project (e.g., setting up Redis HA).
- First 14 days: Deliver pre-defined monitoring goals (e.g., implementing Prometheus rules).
- First 30 days: Independently ship a project (e.g., creating a Custom Resource Definition (CRD) for managing worker pools) and enhance real-time alerting for latency spikes.
- Continuous: Unprompted, deliver infrastructure improvements to make systems more antifragile (e.g., automatic multi-cluster rollovers).
Candidate Process:
- Intro call with the CEO: An introductory conversation about motivations and a brief technical discussion.
- 30-minute Technical Interview with the CTO: Focused on architectural and system design.
- In-person interview with the Founders: A casual meet-up to discuss company vision and culture.
- Work Trial (1 week): A paid 3- to 7-day work trial to collaborate with the team and assess fit.
