Staff Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

We're seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to join us as a technical leader who will shape the future of our platform architecture! You'll work directly with our engineering leadership to drive infrastructure strategy, mentor our growing team, and build systems that scale with our ambitious growth plans. We recently raised a Series C and are experiencing rapid growth not just in the number of customers and users, but also in the kinds of data workflows we can support with our kernel compute backend.

This isn't a hands-off leadership role – you'll be deeply technical while providing strategic direction. We need someone who has strong opinions backed by experience and isn't afraid to make the hard decisions that come with rapid scaling.

What you will do

Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute our infrastructure roadmap across our multi-tenant and single-tenant stacks
• Establish engineering standards, practices, and tooling across the infrastructure team
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to align infrastructure investments with business objectives
• Lead deep database performance optimization and scaling strategies
• Lead infrastructure cost optimization and capacity planning initiatives

Technical Ownership

• Architect and implement scalable solutions on our AWS/Kubernetes/PostgreSQL/Redis stack
• Design container orchestration strategies with Kubernetes patterns and resource optimization
• Design and build robust CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies
• Drive reliability engineering practices including monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies that enhance our platform capabilities

Team Development

• Mentor engineers and help grow their technical skills
• Participate in hiring and building out the infrastructure team
• Foster a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning
• Lead technical design reviews and architecture discussions

About You

Technical Expertise

• 7+ years of infrastructure engineering experience with 3+ years in technical leadership roles
• Deep expertise with AWS services (EC2, RDS, EKS, networking, security)
• Production experience with Kubernetes orchestration and container management
• Experience with database performance engineering - query optimization, execution plan analysis, and datastore selection for different workload patterns
• Proficiency with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
• Solid understanding of application deployment and scaling
• Knowledge of security best practices and compliance frameworks

Leadership Qualities

• Track record of leading technical initiatives in fast-growing companies
• Strong opinions on engineering best practices with the flexibility to adapt
• Excellent communication skills and ability to influence across organizations
• Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid decision-making in a startup environment

Startup Experience

• Understanding of the unique challenges of scaling infrastructure during hypergrowth
• Ability to balance technical debt with feature velocity
• Experience with resource constraints and scrappy problem-solving

Bonus Points

• Advanced Kubernetes operators development and custom resource definitions
• Linux kernel development or systems programming experience
• Background with observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana)
• Contributions to open source infrastructure projects
• Experience with multi-region deployments and disaster recovery planning

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Our stack

Our product is a web-based notebook and app authoring platform. Our frontend is built with Typescript and React, using a combination of Apollo GraphQL and Redux for managing application state and data. On the backend, we also use Typescript to power an Express/Apollo GraphQL server that interacts with Postgres, Redis, and Kubernetes to manage our database and Python kernels. Our backend is tightly integrated with our infrastructure and CI/CD, where we use a combination of Terraform, Helm, and AWS to deploy and maintain our stack.

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In addition to our unique culture, Hex proudly offers a competitive total rewards package, including but not limited to, market-benched salary & equity, comprehensive health benefits, and flexible paid time off.

The salary range for this role is: $215,000 - $270,000

The salary range shown may be a reflection of additional factors such as geographical location and skill ranges/levels we’re open to. Placement in the salary range will be decided upon completion of the interview process, taking into account factors like leaving room for growth, internal fairness & parity, your demonstrated skills, and the depth of your experience. Our Recruiting team will be able to provide more details during the interview process.

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