Founding Engineer, Infrastructure

Founding Engineer, Infrastructure

Location

San Francisco, California

Work Arrangement: On-site — 5 days per week
Position: Full-time
Company Stage: Early-stage, Greylock-incubated AI security startup
Experience: 4–10 years of infrastructure engineering experience
Compensation: $250,000–$325,000 base + 0.25%–0.5% equity
Relocation: $15,000 relocation support to San Francisco
Visa: Open to visa transfers and new sponsorship, including H-1B and TN

Company Description

We are building an AI security platform that gives large enterprises visibility into and control over the AI models and agents operating across their environments. The platform monitors agent activity across browsers, SaaS applications, endpoints, and cloud infrastructure, enforcing security policies and stopping risky actions in real time.

Backed by leading venture investors and experienced technology founders, the company is working with enterprise customers, including major financial institutions, and has approximately 15 active pilots. As customer demand grows, the team is expanding its engineering capacity to support increasingly complex enterprise deployments.

You'll join a small, ambitious founding team and work directly with the founders to build the infrastructure at the core of the product. This is an opportunity to own critical networking and distributed systems components, solve performance-sensitive engineering challenges, and help shape the technical foundation of an emerging AI security platform.

What You Will Do

• Build protocol-aware infrastructure: Design and implement proxies and gateways that process model traffic, MCP tool calls, and database requests, using technologies such as Envoy and network-layer tooling.

• Optimize the critical request path: Build low-latency infrastructure that evaluates security policies and performs inline model checks on every request without disrupting the user experience.

• Develop distributed systems: Design, build, and operate production infrastructure that handles high request volumes and demanding enterprise workloads.

• Build data pipelines and storage systems: Develop systems that make agent activity searchable and queryable for security investigations, monitoring, and behavioral analysis.

• Work at the protocol level: Solve challenging problems involving wire-format parsing, packet captures, network protocols, and tail-latency optimization.

• Own infrastructure end-to-end: Take responsibility for technical design, implementation, deployment, performance, reliability, and ongoing operation.

• Lead enterprise deployments: Spend approximately 20% of your time working directly with customers to support cloud, VPC, and on-premises deployments.

• Build across the infrastructure stack: Work with Rust, Go, Python, networking tools, gateways, load balancers, and storage systems.

• Collaborate directly with the founders: Make foundational technical decisions and help establish engineering practices as the team scales.

• Move quickly in a startup environment: Balance deep infrastructure engineering with customer requirements and the practical needs of a growing business.

Ideal Candidate Background

Required Experience

• 4–10 years of professional experience as an infrastructure engineer or in a closely related systems engineering role.

• Experience building and operating infrastructure or distributed systems in production at scale.

• Strong understanding of networking, distributed systems, and performance-sensitive software.

• Protocol-level expertise, including experience with wire-format parsers, packet captures, or tail-latency optimization.

• Experience at an infrastructure, database, developer platform, or technology company where the underlying system is a core part of the product.

• Strong hands-on engineering skills and the ability to own complex systems from design through production.

• Experience working in a startup or similarly fast-moving engineering environment.

• Ability to work directly with customers on technical deployments when needed.

• Willingness to work on-site in San Francisco five days per week.

Technical Skills

Core Engineering

• Infrastructure and distributed systems engineering.

• Networking protocols and protocol-level debugging.

• Performance optimization and low-latency systems.

• Wire-format parsing and packet analysis.

• High-throughput, production-grade systems.

• Systems design, reliability, and operational ownership.

Relevant Technologies

• Programming languages: Rust, Go, Python.

• Networking and traffic management: Envoy, proxies, gateways, load balancers.

• Infrastructure: Cloud infrastructure, VPC deployments, and on-premises deployments.

• Data systems: High-volume data pipelines, storage engines, and queryable event data.

• Systems concepts: Distributed systems, network layers, tail-latency optimization, and protocol parsing.

Candidates do not need to have worked with every technology listed. Prioritize demonstrated systems and networking depth, protocol-level expertise, and experience building infrastructure that runs reliably at scale.

Preferred Background

• Experience at infrastructure, database, or technology companies such as Databricks, Snowflake, DuckDB, Stripe, Ramp, Notion, OpenAI, Plaid, or Datadog.

• Experience at security infrastructure startups or companies building networking and traffic-management systems.

• Experience working in the data path, network layer, or data pipelines.

• Experience building proxies, gateways, load balancers, storage engines, or systems using Envoy.

• Experience building low-latency systems where performance is critical to the product.

• Experience operating infrastructure for high-volume enterprise workloads.

• Experience supporting customer deployments across cloud, VPC, or on-premises environments.

• Startup experience and evidence of taking ownership beyond a narrowly defined engineering task.

Working Style and Culture

• Strong systems thinking: Understands how networking, protocols, distributed systems, and infrastructure components work together.

• Performance-oriented: Can identify bottlenecks and make informed trade-offs around latency, throughput, and reliability.

• Hands-on ownership: Builds and operates production systems rather than focusing only on architecture or coordination.

• Startup adaptability: Comfortable working with a small founding team and changing priorities.

• Bias toward execution: Can move quickly from investigation to implementation and deployment.

• Customer awareness: Understands how infrastructure decisions affect enterprise deployments and customer outcomes.

• Technical depth: Can explain system behavior, debugging approaches, and low-level engineering decisions in detail.

• Strong career progression: Demonstrates increasing technical ownership and meaningful engineering contributions over time.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $250,000–$325,000.

• Equity: Approximately 0.25%–0.5%, according to the role highlights; confirm the final grant with the hiring team.

• Work arrangement: On-site in San Francisco, five days per week.

• Relocation support: $15,000 to relocate to San Francisco.

• Visa support: Open to eligible visa transfers and new sponsorship, including H-1B and TN.

• Ownership and impact: Opportunity to own foundational infrastructure at an early-stage company.

• Technical scope: Work on networking, distributed systems, low-latency policy enforcement, and AI security infrastructure.

• Customer exposure: Work directly with enterprise customers on technical deployments.

• Founding-team collaboration: Partner closely with the founders on core architecture and engineering decisions.

Why Join?

• Build critical AI security infrastructure: Help enterprises secure AI models and agents operating across their environments.

• Own the technical core: Build the proxies, gateways, and distributed systems that sit directly in the path of agent activity.

• Solve difficult systems problems: Work on protocol parsing, network traffic, low-latency policy evaluation, and high-volume data infrastructure.

• Make foundational decisions: Join a small team where your engineering decisions can directly shape the product.

• Work with enterprise customers: Help deploy security infrastructure in real customer environments, including cloud, VPC, and on-premises systems.

• Have broad ownership: Balance deep technical work with deployment challenges and direct collaboration with the founders.

• Receive competitive compensation: Earn $250,000–$325,000 in base salary, meaningful equity, and relocation support.