Founding Production Systems Engineer

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Job Title: Founding Production Systems Engineer

Location | On-Site - San Francisco, CA

Time Zone | PST

Role Overview:

We are seeking a Founding Production Systems Engineer to join an early-stage AI video infrastructure startup. The company's first product turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos in seconds, working toward a bigger vision of making video generation as fast, cheap, and programmable as text is today. As one of the first engineering hires, you will keep the product's core systems reliable and scalable as usage grows - debugging ambiguous production issues, improving observability, and making sure the system runs smoothly and cost-effectively over time.

Key Responsibilities:

Improve reliability of job execution, queueing behavior, and failure recovery

Build monitoring, alerting, and incident-response workflows suited for an early but serious production system

Design systems that scale expensive workflows without hurting speed or predictability

Improve cost efficiency across compute, storage, and third-party services

Build internal tools that simplify debugging and system operations for the team

Partner with the broader team to align product needs with robust technical solutions

Required Qualifications:

Experience operating production infrastructure or high-throughput backend systems

Strong debugging skills across services, networking, storage, and cloud environments

Familiarity with queues, object storage, databases, and observability tooling

Comfortable owning ambiguous reliability problems without a predefined root cause

Practical judgment about when to automate, simplify, or build minimal robust solutions

Comfortable using AI tools to increase speed, while relying on personal judgment to solve problems

Must be willing to work on-site in San Francisco, CA

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience clearly communicating tradeoffs to non-infrastructure engineers

Track record of owning outcomes independently, not just executing tickets

Comfortable making infrastructure decisions with limited oversight

Tools & Technology:

Queueing systems and object storage

Databases and observability tooling

Cloud infrastructure and deployment automation

AI-assisted development tools

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