Senior DevOps Engineer

ABOUT US We're solving AI's hardest problem: alignment.   Encord is the data layer for Physical AI and enterprise, serving as core infrastructure for 300+ teams at the cutting edge of AI, including Woven by Toyota, Hitachi, Skydio, AbbVie, Dyna, Walden, and Agility Robotics. From autonomous vehicles and robotics to sports and healthcare, we're solving AI's hardest problem: turning complex, real-world data into production-ready intelligent systems.   We're a team of former founders, scientists, quants, researchers, and even Olympians who’ve helped build some of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, and alumni of MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial. We’ve raised $110M from early investors in companies like Databricks, ElevenLabs, and Vercel, and we’re growing at an extraordinary pace.   We're looking for exceptional people who want to help build a category-defining company, operating with high urgency and taking real ownership to help shape the future of AI. THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer with 5+ years of experience to join our growing platform engineering team in New York. You'll be embedded in the teams building and operating Encord's core infrastructure, ensuring our platform is performant, reliable, observable, and scalable. You'll drive a culture of automation, performance, and resilience through individual contributions and collaboration with multiple squads. WHAT YOU'LL DO - CI/CD & Deployment Own and continuously improve deployment pipelines; partner closely with developers to review infrastructure changes, streamline release processes, and champion DevOps best practices across the engineering group. - Infrastructure & Cloud Design, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS; manage Kubernetes clusters, networking, and storage at petabyte scale, with infrastructure-as-code as the default. - Automation & Tooling Drive developer productivity by building, guiding, and reviewing automation and internal tooling efforts across the engineering group; eliminate manual toil wherever it exists. - Performance & Capacity Profile and optimise services handling large-scale data pipelines; perform capacity planning for storage and compute-intensive workloads. Work with squads to establish performance benchmarks and expectations. - Reliability & Availability Define and own SLIs/SLOs/SLAs for critical services; build alerting, runbooks, and incident response processes; lead postmortems with a blameless culture. - Observability Instrument services with distributed tracing, logging, and metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, GCP Dashboards or similar); build infrastructure, define best practices, and work with each squad to ensure every service is observable before it goes to production. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 4+ years of hands-on DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE experience in a production environment. - Strong experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation at scale. - Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi) and configuration management. - Strong fundamentals in designing, building, and maintaining resilient distributed and/or high performance systems. - Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and containerised workloads in cloud environments (GCP and/or AWS). - Solid understanding of networking, operating systems, and database technologies. - Experience with observability fundamentals metrics, logs, traces, and alerting. TECH STACK - We are technology agnostic at Encord and not looking for experience across all of these — as long as you're open to learning, please apply. - Backend: Python - Frontend: TypeScript and React - Deployment: Kubernetes - Infrastructure: GCP - Machine learning: PyTorch, CUDA, Ray WHY ENCORD - Competitive salary, commission, and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup - Clear, accelerated growth opportunities as the company scales rapidly - Strong in-person culture: 4 days/week - Daily team lunches & dinners - Annual learning & development budget - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage - US employees: 18 paid vacation days plus US public holidays - UK employees: 25 paid vacation days plus UK public holidays - Frequent travel opportunities across the U.S., London, and Europe - Bi-annual company offsites & monthly socials   OPERATING PRINCIPLES   High agency You see something broken, you fix it or find the person who can. We celebrate the people who solve 90% of a problem before anyone asks. Build with care & urgency We bear-hug the customer. Former founders and people from fast-moving, high-stakes environments thrive here. Self-aware & hungry We stay warm, self-aware, and genuinely hungry. We elevate our peers, and ego doesn't last long. Invent in real time We move toward the ambiguity. We’re pragmatic, resourceful, energized by the fact that there's no playbook.   If you're looking to do the most meaningful work of your career alongside people who push you to be better, we'd love to meet you.