About the job
At WRITER, our mission to expand human capacity with superintelligence relies on a foundational truth: our platform must be available, performant, and reliable, 24/7. As an Infrastructure engineer, you'll be at the heart of making this a reality, impacting every enterprise customer who trusts us with their AI-powered workflows. This isn't just about keeping the lights on; it's about pushing the boundaries of what's possible, proactively identifying and solving complex systemic challenges, and laying the groundwork for our rapid growth and the evolving demands of enterprise generative AI. You'll build resilient systems, automate across the stack, and champion reliability best practices, directly enabling our ambitious product roadmap and ensuring our customers always have access to the powerful tools they need.
Responsibilities
- Bring deep focus to one problem at a time, with the breadth to move between SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Platform work over a quarter or two as the leverage shifts.
- Challenge the status quo and remove toil before adding features — automate operational tasks and infrastructure management with Python or Go, reject tools that don't fit the problem, and treat manual on-call work as a defect to be designed out, not a status quo to be staffed up.
- Design scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure across AWS (preferred), GCP, and Azure, working fluently across Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and the supporting cloud and AI tooling that backs WRITER's high-traffic platform.
- Run agents in your daily loop — Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills — to investigate incidents, draft Terraform / Helm changes, write runbooks, scaffold tooling, and review PRs. Build the agentic setup as a collective surface: humans and digital teammates working as one team, with shared skills, shared context, and shared on-call workflows.
- Lead incident response, post-mortems, and root-cause analyses — trace failures to the underlying problem (never the symptom), apply the learning back into the architecture, and prevent the same incident from happening twice.
- Own the reliability, performance, and efficiency of WRITER's core services end-to-end — define and uphold the SLOs and error budgets, carry the on-call pager, and stand behind the outcome metric, not just the system you shipped.
- Balance this week's critical work with the 6–12-month platform direction — ship the on-call-driving fix today while shaping the multi-year observability, cost, and reliability investments that move WRITER's enterprise customers.
- Operate at the seams with product, security, and engineering peers — provide expert guidance on system design for reliability, performance, and scalability from conception through launch, Connect the infra agenda to product and revenue context, and disagree with evidence, not volume.
Qualifications
Minimum
- 5+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or a similar role focused on building and operating large-scale, high-availability production systems at a high-growth product company.
- Experience running containerisation in production (a real cluster, not a lab), with experience in Helm and Terraform or Pulumi on at least one major cloud (AWS preferred), plus good proficiency in Python or Go for automation and tooling.
- AI is part of how you ship, not a thing you've read about — agentic tooling (Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills) is in your daily loop, you've built or adopted AI-assisted workflows others now use, and you have strong opinions on where it's unreliable.
- Demonstrated ability to Challenge the status quo, proactively identify systemic weaknesses, and propose innovative solutions to complex reliability problems — reason from constraints and failure modes (not analogy or vendor defaults), name the tradeoff in business terms (reliability vs. velocity, cost vs. blast radius, standardisation vs. one-off), and reject the "best practices" answer when it doesn't fit the problem.
- Make reversible calls by default — write the rollback before you touch production, work fluently with monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or equivalent), and stress the system in safe places so it comes back stronger.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, with a talent for building strong relationships and Connecting with cross-functional teams — surface non-goals before anyone asks, and partner with product, security, and platform peers as one delivery surface.
- A strong sense of ownership and accountability, eager to Own mission-critical systems and drive them toward peak performance and unparalleled reliability. At least one 0-to-1 infrastructure build you owned end-to-end, with the outcome metric attached.
Preferred
- A software-engineering background, not only config and scripting — you've designed, built, and shipped non-trivial production code (services, libraries, internal frameworks) in Python, Go, or a comparable language, you can read and modify the codebases your infrastructure runs, and you move between infra automation and feature engineering without changing brains.