Founding Infrastructure Engineer
Plus10 Recruitment · San Francisco, CA
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Jul 26, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Jul 27, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A founding infrastructure role at a small consumer app company operating at significant scale. The engineer will take sole ownership of CI/CD pipelines, Postgres database strategy, and observability tooling, building the infrastructure function from scratch rather than joining an existing team. The work spans backend scaling, incident response, and setting the standards that future infrastructure hires will inherit.
Senior level · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,250 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 930–1,600
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The title in the posting is 'Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer' but the actual mandate — first dedicated infrastructure hire, greenfield ownership of CI/CD, database strategy, observability, and scaling — clearly maps to a Senior-level scope.
SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role is framed as an Infrastructure Engineer who will BUILD pipelines, tooling, and observability systems (pointing to 15-1252 Software Developers), but also heavily OPERATES and scales production systems (pointing to 15-1244). The primary deliverables — designing CI/CD pipelines, building telemetry, and architecting database strategy — lean toward building/shipping code, so 15-1252 was chosen with 15-1244 as the runner-up.
No specific total years of experience are stated; the JD uses qualitative language ('strong experience', 'deep knowledge') without a numeric floor.
Compensation is described only as 'competitive salary and benefits' with a $1,500/mo lunch credit called out — no salary range is disclosed.
Go and AlloyDB are explicitly flagged as a plus ('Go and AlloyDB experience is a plus'), so they are marked as preferred.
The role is explicitly in-office 5 days a week at San Francisco HQ — not remote.
Read the full posting
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