Founding Infrastructure Engineer

## About the Role PayOS is the global payments infrastructure for AI-driven commerce. Today, AI is set to transform the world of commerce, yet it faces one critical barrier: the inability to transact autonomously. Our mission is to build the financial backbone for this new paradigm, making autonomous payments as seamless and secure as traditional e-commerce. PayOS sits at the explosive intersection of two global mega-trends: Generative AI and Digital Payments. This is a global opportunity from day one. With the generative AI market forecasted to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032, our vision is clear: become the definitive infrastructure provider for this emergent economy and set the worldwide standard for AI-native transactions. This is a demanding, hands-on role for an engineer ready to make a career-defining impact. As a founding engineer, you will be an integral part of our core team, responsible for architecting and building the rock-solid, globally distributed cloud infrastructure that will underpin our entire financial platform. You will have ultimate ownership over our production environment—from automation and uptime to security and ultra-low latency. You'll solve the core challenge of building a network capable of handling massive transactional volume with extreme reliability. ## Responsibilities - Build the Foundation: Design, build, and own our core cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform). - Automate Everything: Architect, implement and enhance our CI/CD pipelines to ensure developers can ship code rapidly and reliably. - Ensure Production Excellence: Be the champion for uptime, performance, and reliability. Implement our comprehensive observability strategy using Datadog. - Secure the Platform: Design and enforce rigorous security protocols across our infrastructure to meet the highest standards of financial compliance. - Design for Scale & Speed: Architect low-latency, highly scalable APIs and backend services capable of handling a massive volume of global transactions. ## Requirements - High Agency: You thrive in ambiguity. You can take a high-level goal, define a clear path forward, and drive it to completion without needing step-by-step guidance. - A Proven Infrastructure Builder: You have a strong track record of designing and maintaining scalable, reliable, and secure cloud infrastructure for mission-critical systems. - Holistic Infrastructure Ownership: Your expertise goes deep. You have a strong background in hardening cloud environments (network security, IAM, secrets management), managing production databases, and planning for business continuity with disaster recovery. You also understand the business context, with experience in cloud cost optimization and a passion for improving developer experience. - Infrastructure-as-Code Expertise: You are highly proficient with Terraform and believe that all infrastructure should be managed through code. - CI/CD Mastery: You have deep experience building and managing automated CI/CD pipelines. - Cloud Native Proficiency: You have a solid understanding of modern cloud architecture, ideally with hands-on experience in Azure. - A Strategic and Opinionated Leader: You don't just execute on a roadmap; you help create it. You have well-formed opinions on architecture and best practices. We are hiring you to be our expert, and we expect you to challenge us and make our platform better. - A Company Builder: You are a partner in building the business. You'll help shape our engineering culture, establish our technical standards, and have a direct impact on who we hire next. - No-Ego Team Player: You are a partner in building the business. You'll help shape our engineering culture and establish our technical standards. You thrive in a small team environment where direct, unfiltered feedback is valued and the best ideas emerge from rigorous, ego-free debate. ## Your Background Looks Something Like - 5+ years of experience in infrastructure or platform engineering roles. - Built or scaled systems with meaningful production traffic and load. - Production experience with Azure (or similar, like GCP/AWS), Terraform (or similar, like CDK/Pulumi), and modern CI/CD. - Strong experience with databases, caches, proxies, secrets, task queues, observability, containers, and orchestration systems. - Experience with multi-tenant platforms or developer-facing products. - Excellent problem-solving skills, a passion for scalable systems, and a product mindset (you understand how excellence in infra drives product wins). ## Nice to Have - Prior experience as a founder or founding engineer. - Joined a company early enough to experience a few orders of magnitude of scale increase. - Hands-on work with secrets management or security best practices for cloud infrastructure. - Contributions to open-source projects. - Fintech Experience: Previous experience in fintech, payments, or other financially regulated environments is a significant advantage. ## What We Offer - Salary: Our target base salary for this role is between $120,000 and $150,000. The final offer will be determined by the candidate's experience and location. - Equity: A meaningful founding-team equity grant. - Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance. ## How to Apply If this mission and role excite you, we'd love to hear from you. Please send in your application, resume, and most importantly a note on the most interesting and scalable system you've built in your professional career to [email protected].