Founding Platform & Reliability Engineer

Founding Platform & Reliability Engineer

About OpenArt

OpenArt is an AI Storytelling and Visual Creation Platform used by millions worldwide. We’re building the next generation of creative tools powered by cutting-edge AI, enabling anyone to create videos, visuals, characters, and stories with unprecedented speed and imagination. We believe the future of creativity is AI-native, and we're shaping that future.

🚀 Why Join OpenArt

• Small team, massive surface area, senior engineers own real systems, not slices.

• Ship at real scale, your work goes to millions of users, fast.

• Founder-led engineering culture, both founders are technical and deeply involved in product and architecture.

• AI-native product, you’ll design how cutting-edge AI models are exposed as real user experiences.

• High ownership, low process, we value judgment, clarity, and speed over bureaucracy.

• 7-10X growth in revenue for the past 2 years. Now you’ll play a critical role in helping the company scale to the next stage.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Founding Platform & Reliability Engineer who can own the design, scalability, and reliability of our entire infrastructure stack end-to-end , from high-level architecture decisions to hands-on implementation, observability, and cost optimization.

This is NOT a role for traditional operators or narrow DevOps specialists. You should be comfortable working across cloud infrastructure , distributed systems , backend services , and developer tooling , making pragmatic decisions that balance product velocity , system reliability , and cost efficiency —especially in a fast-evolving, AI-native environment.

You will work closely with the founders and product engineers to design and evolve the platform that powers OpenArt, shaping key decisions such as serverless vs. containerized architecture , multi-provider AI reliability , and scaling systems to millions of users —while acting as a force multiplier for the entire engineering team.

🛠 What You’ll Do

• Define and operationalize SLOs/SLIs across critical user journeys (generation, editing, payments/credits, uploads, etc.), and use them to drive prioritization (including error budgets)

• Participate in an on-call rotation and lead incident response improvements (alert quality, runbooks, escalation paths). Establish blameless postmortems and ensure action items are implemented.

• Implement reliability patterns at external boundaries, and build mechanisms for per-vendor “health” measurement and routing/fallback policies

• Stand up end-to-end observability: structured logs, metrics, traces, and dashboards that let engineers answer “what broke” and “why now” quickly.

• Build deploy safety practices: automated rollbacks, canarying, feature-flag patterns, and reliable CI/CD gates.

• Own the direction of our infrastructure architecture , including defining when serverless is the right approach versus when we should evolve toward containerized or more managed systems, and guiding the team through those transitions as we scale.

• Build cost observability and cost-control primitives: per-request cost attribution, caching strategies, capacity planning, and budget alerts.

• Act as a senior technical voice, influencing architecture, tooling, engineering best practices, and raising the overall engineering bar.

🧑 What We’re Looking For

Core Requirements

• 5+ years building and operating production systems where reliability and scaling are core.

• Strong software engineering skills (you can ship production code, not just configure tools).

• Cloud-native experience (AWS or GCP), ideally with serverless/event-driven systems and at least one container path (Fargate/ECS/Cloud Run/Kubernetes).

• Deep knowledge of observability practices: dashboards, alerting, distributed tracing, and incident response maturity.

• Ability to design resilient interactions with external dependencies (timeouts, retries/backoff/jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency).

• Can communicate tradeoffs to non-infra peers clearly

• Ability to operate with ambiguity and define problems before solving them.

Nice to Have

• Have designed an internal platform abstraction (e.g., API gateway / workflow engine / job orchestration) that enabled multiple product teams to ship faster with fewer incidents.

• Have shipped concrete reliability outcomes: e.g., reduced MTTR, improved SLO attainment, lowered p95 latency, or reduced infra/unit costs

• Prior startup experience or experience owning large surface-area features.

⚙ Tech Stack You’ll Work With

GCP, Cloud Run, Modal, Upstash, Sentry, Amplitude, Firebase, Redis, React / Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, etc.

Compensation

• Competitive base salary and bonus program

• Equity - meaningful ownership in what you build

• High autonomy, high growth environment

Work Setup

• Bay Area preferred (hybrid allowed)

• Visa sponsorship available

• We’ll consider remote