Founding Senior Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer

Description

Job Summary: NAIIAN is seeking a Founding Senior Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer to build the cloud and operational foundation from scratch at a Deep Tech startup. Key Highlights: 1. You will join NAIIAN's first wave of engineering. 2. You will define the operation of a sensitive AI platform from day one. 3. You will work directly with the CTO and founding team, with full technical autonomy. **Location:** Madrid (Preferably on-site, with high flexibility negotiable) **Compensation:** EUR 70,000 – EUR 90,000 gross annual salary + significant founding equity + benefits https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/naiian/88163831\-b4d7\-4c94\-b5ab\-d57a9f4d42e0 **About NAIIAN and the Challenge** NAIIAN is a well-funded European Deep Tech startup with its founding team based in Madrid. We are building a cloud-based AI platform for clients operating in contexts demanding high operational and decision-making rigor. The platform will handle AI-assisted workflows, sensitive data, document processing, multi-tenancy, permissions, auditing, and external vendor dependencies. Here, infrastructure is not a separate layer from the product — it is part of the product. We are looking for our **Founding Senior Cloud / Infrastructure Engineer** to build the cloud and operational foundation from scratch, free from inherited technical debt. In our platform, reliability means more than just uptime: it also encompasses latency, cost, rate limits, worker saturation, and real observability of AI services. **Our approach to teamwork:** We strongly believe in the magic that happens when working side-by-side in front of a whiteboard during this critical 0-to-1 phase. Therefore, our ideal scenario is having you in our Madrid office. However, we recognize that exceptional talent requires flexibility. If you’re the right person, we’ll collaborate to design a work model (hybrid or concentrated on-site) that fits both your life and the company’s goals. **Why join us?** * You’ll join NAIIAN’s first wave of engineering — before inertia, inherited debt, or a locked-in platform exist. * You’ll define how a sensitive AI platform operates from day one: security, cost, observability, and reliability. * You’ll work directly with the CTO and founding team, with substantial technical autonomy and rapid decision-making. * You’ll receive a competitive salary, health insurance, meal vouchers, and significant founding equity — designed so the upside matters if the company captures the opportunity we’re building. * This role is for someone who wants infrastructure to be an operational advantage — not just support. **What impact will you have?** * **Infrastructure and CI/CD:** Design and maintain reproducible development, staging, and production environments; implement CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), rollback readiness, and release practices. * **End-to-End Observability:** Build end-to-end observability (logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and operational dashboards); define initial SLOs, incident response, postmortems, and runbooks. * **AI Operations and Scalability:** Support AI service operations (e.g., Bedrock, model/provider routing, traceability), design fallback paths, manage rate limits, and implement autoscaling, capacity planning, and cost controls. * **Security and Pragmatism:** Manage secrets, permissions, networks, backups, hardening, and cloud security — designing a pragmatic architecture that can scale without over-engineering the platform. * **AI-Driven Automation:** Create runbooks, agent instructions, infrastructure specifications, and verifications to make operations repeatable. **Who are we looking for?** * **Track Record:** You have real production ownership experience: handling real incidents, making decisions under pressure, and learning from outcomes. * **Core Cloud & IaC:** You have solid experience with AWS (or GCP/Azure) and CI/CD and IaC using Terraform, Pulumi, OpenTofu, CDK, or equivalents. * **FinOps & Reliability:** You understand capacity planning and cost engineering; you know that reliability without cost control is not sustainable reliability. * **AI-Driven:** You have experience — or genuine enthusiasm — for working with coding agents (e.g., Codex, Claude Code, Gemini, or equivalents), using specs and rigorous review. * **Bonus Points:** You’ve operated managed AI services (e.g., Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI), have batch processing or queuing experience, have FinOps experience, or come from domains handling sensitive data (fintech, enterprise SaaS, data platforms). Technology Stack We value equivalent experience and sound judgment for operating production cloud systems: * **Cloud & IaC:** AWS (ideal); Terraform (ideal); alternatives such as OpenTofu, Pulumi, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, or Terragrunt are also welcome. * **CI/CD:** GitHub Actions (ideal) or equivalents like GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, Jenkins, Buildkite, Concourse, or Argo CD. * **Observability:** OpenTelemetry, Grafana Stack, and ELK Stack for logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboards. * **Runtime & Tooling:** Lambda, ECS/Fargate, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS (if adding value), Cloud Run or equivalent platforms. Python for scripting, operational tooling, or integration with AI workloads. * **AI Operations & Developer Workflow:** AWS Bedrock, cost controls, traceability, coding agents, AGENTS.md, Skills/SKILLS, and SDD with OpenSpec/Spec Kit. **Our Commitment to You** * **Competitive Salary:** EUR 70,000 – EUR 90,000 gross annual salary, commensurate with demonstrated experience. * **Skin in the Game:** Significant founding equity aligned with impact, seniority, and timing of entry. * **High-Performance Setup:** MacBook Pro with your choice of configuration, 40" Dell monitor, keyboard and mouse of your choice, and Herman Miller (or equivalent) chair — available from day one. * **Personal Care:** Health insurance and meal vouchers. * **Full Autonomy:** Real ownership over NAIIAN’s cloud and operational foundation, backed by a senior founding team and rapid decision-making. Data Protection The personal data you share with us during the process (CV, contact details, professional information, communications, and interview inputs) will be processed by Naiian solely to manage your application for this position and — if you provide explicit consent — for future compatible recruitment processes. The legal basis for processing is the implementation of pre-contractual measures at your request (Art. 6.1.b GDPR) and, where applicable, your consent (Art. 6.1.a GDPR). Your data will be retained for as long as necessary to manage your application and, unless you exercise your right to erasure, for up to one year if you authorize retention for future processes. We do not carry out automated decision-making with significant legal effects. You may exercise your rights of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction, and data portability, as well as withdraw consent, at any time by writing to the contact address provided in the application form. You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (www.aepd.es). — Naiian Recruiting Team