Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Growth Stage / VC-Backed
Office Type: Hybrid — 3 days per week in-office
Salary: $160,000 – $250,000 Base
Equity: Competitive Equity
Visa: Open to Visa Transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers
Experience: 4+ years of software engineering experience, with strong distributed systems and infrastructure experience
Employment Type: Full-time
Hiring Count: 1 candidate

Company Description

Our client is a growing, VC-backed enterprise technology company building infrastructure and security software for modern organizations.

The company helps enterprises manage complex access, authorization, and security requirements across employees, contractors, service accounts, and increasingly automated systems.

The engineering organization is lean and highly experienced, with a strong emphasis on ownership, autonomy, and engineering quality. The infrastructure team works closely with product engineers, technical leadership, and enterprise customers to build reliable systems that operate at significant scale.

This is not a traditional SRE or DevOps role. The team is looking for a strong software engineer who is deeply interested in infrastructure, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and building reliable systems through code.

This is an opportunity to own critical infrastructure components, influence architecture, enable other engineers to ship faster, and work directly with customers and leadership in a high-impact startup environment.

What You Will Do

Build & Scale Infrastructure Systems

• Design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure supporting a large-scale enterprise platform.
• Own critical infrastructure components from architecture through production operation.
• Build systems that prioritize stability, security, scalability, and performance.
• Improve the reliability and efficiency of distributed systems running across cloud environments.
• Identify infrastructure bottlenecks and develop scalable solutions as the platform grows.

Drive Architecture & Engineering Quality

• Make meaningful architectural decisions with a high degree of autonomy.
• Design and improve distributed systems and platform architecture.
• Establish engineering patterns and best practices across infrastructure.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and operational maturity.
• Contribute to technical roadmap and long-term platform strategy.

Empower Product Engineering

• Build tools, platforms, and infrastructure that enable product engineers to move quickly.
• Create reusable systems and developer tooling that improve engineering productivity.
• Establish best practices around infrastructure, deployment, reliability, and system design.
• Partner closely with product engineers to understand infrastructure needs and remove technical bottlenecks.
• Help improve engineering processes and standards across the organization.

Work Directly With Leadership & Customers

• Partner with the CTO, product leadership, and engineering teams on architecture and roadmap decisions.
• Work directly with enterprise customers to understand infrastructure-related issues and product feedback.
• Translate customer problems into technical requirements and infrastructure improvements.
• Participate in product discussions and influence technical direction.
• Help shape the platform as the company scales.

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong experience building distributed systems and infrastructure through software.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating reliable production systems.
• Strong coding fundamentals and software engineering depth.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure at meaningful scale.
• Experience owning technical systems end-to-end.
• Demonstrated ability to operate with significant autonomy.
• Experience in a strong engineering environment with high standards for software quality.
• Startup experience is strongly preferred.
• Candidates who have experience at a strong engineering organization followed by startup experience can be particularly relevant.

Technical Requirements

• Strong production software engineering fundamentals.
• Strong experience with Go or another systems-oriented programming language.
• Experience building distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS and/or GCP.
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized infrastructure.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, particularly Terraform.
• Strong understanding of production reliability and scalability.
• Experience with databases such as PostgreSQL.
• Experience with caching systems such as Redis.
• Experience with event-driven systems and messaging platforms such as Kafka.
• Familiarity with GraphQL is a plus.
• TypeScript and React experience is a plus.
• Strong understanding of APIs, networking, and service architecture.

Infrastructure & Systems Requirements

• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture.
• Experience designing highly available production systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Understanding of service discovery, deployment, scaling, and operational reliability.
• Experience with infrastructure automation and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience diagnosing performance and reliability issues.
• Understanding of observability, monitoring, logging, and debugging.
• Experience building infrastructure that supports other engineering teams.
• Ability to make sound infrastructure tradeoffs around reliability, scalability, performance, and developer velocity.

Soft Skills

• High agency and strong independent judgment.
• Strong curiosity about how systems work.
• Comfortable investigating unfamiliar technical problems.
• Strong ownership mentality.
• Comfortable making architectural decisions without extensive direction.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Comfortable working directly with senior leadership.
• Comfortable interacting directly with enterprise customers.
• Strong product and business awareness.
• Comfortable operating in a lean startup environment.
• Committed to building high-quality systems while maintaining execution speed.

Compensation & Benefits

• $160,000 – $250,000 base salary, depending on experience.
• Competitive equity.
• Full-time employment.
• Hybrid work arrangement in San Francisco.
• 3 days per week in-office, with many team members working from the office more frequently.
• Visa transfers supported, including OPT and H-1B transfers.
• Opportunity to work directly with senior technical leadership.
• Significant ownership over foundational infrastructure.
• Direct exposure to enterprise customers and complex production systems.

Why Join

• Build infrastructure powering a critical enterprise security platform.
• Work on challenging distributed systems and cloud infrastructure problems.
• Own foundational infrastructure components with substantial autonomy.
• Work alongside a highly experienced engineering team.
• Build systems used by major enterprises and high-growth technology companies.
• Work directly with product engineers to improve developer velocity.
• Have direct exposure to enterprise customers and their technical challenges.
• Influence architecture and engineering standards across the platform.
• Work closely with technical leadership in a lean, high-impact organization.
• Operate at the intersection of software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise security.