Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.
We are:
Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
Actively expanding into new financial services segments
Building together in person in San Francisco
We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.
About the RoleWe're hiring a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to own Salient's cloud footprint across AWS, GCP, and Render. You will make our infrastructure consistent across providers, stay ahead of capacity as call volume and customers grow, make every dollar of cloud spend attributable, and execute on cost-cutting opportunities.
You will work directly with engineering, product, and company leadership. You will own outcomes, not tickets: reliability, consistency, capacity, and cost of the platform that runs every borrower conversation Salient handles.
What You'll Own• Day-to-day operation of Salient's infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Render, to one consistent standard.
• Infrastructure as code: bringing resources under Terraform (or equivalent), reusable modules, consistent environments, and drift detection.
• Capacity management: forecasting demand, autoscaling, quotas, and headroom for real-time voice and AI workloads.
• Cost attribution and monitoring: tagging, allocation by product and customer, unit-cost metrics, dashboards, budgets, and anomaly alerts.
• Cost reduction: identifying, prioritizing, and shipping savings through rightsizing, commitments, cleanup, consolidation, and provider moves where justified.
• Reliability and observability of the platform, including incident response and post-mortem follow-through.
• Secure, auditable infrastructure that supports SOC 2 and customer security requirements.
What You'll Bring• You've operated production infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP at meaningful scale, and you're comfortable across providers.
• You manage infrastructure as code and have brought messy, hand-built environments under control.
• You've delivered measurable cloud cost savings and can explain pricing models, commitments, and data transfer costs.
• You've planned capacity for spiky or latency-sensitive workloads and tuned autoscaling in production.
• You build monitoring and alerting that catch problems early, and you lead incidents calmly.
• You design for least privilege, auditability, and safe change management by default.
• You favor simple, consistent systems over sophisticated ones and know what not to build.
• You write clearly and can explain cost and reliability tradeoffs to engineers, finance, and leadership.
Nice to Have• Experience with real-time voice, telephony, WebRTC, or streaming systems.
• Experience running GPU or LLM inference workloads, or managing spend on hosted AI APIs.
• FinOps practice experience (e.g., cost allocation programs, FinOps certification) or experience in a regulated industry such as financial services.
Why This RoleSalient runs live borrower conversations for lenders, and our infrastructure spans three providers that grew quickly alongside the business. You'll have the ownership and leverage to make it consistent, predictable, and efficient, with direct impact on reliability for customers and on the company's margins.
At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.
We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.
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Skills Required
- Production infrastructure experience on AWS and/or GCP at meaningful scale
- Experience operating infrastructure across multiple cloud providers
- Infrastructure as code experience, including Terraform or an equivalent tool
- Experience bringing hand-built infrastructure environments under consistent management
- Demonstrated cloud cost savings and understanding of pricing models, commitments, and data transfer costs
- Capacity planning for spiky or latency-sensitive workloads
- Production autoscaling experience
- Monitoring, alerting, observability, and incident response experience
- Experience designing for least privilege, auditability, and safe change management
- Clear written communication and ability to explain cost and reliability tradeoffs
- Experience with real-time voice, telephony, WebRTC, or streaming systems
- Experience running GPU or LLM inference workloads or managing hosted AI API spend
- FinOps practice experience or certification
- Experience in a regulated industry such as financial services
What We Do
At Salient, we’re rebuilding consumer loan servicing from the ground up - with agentic AI at the core. We started with auto lending, a $1.5 trillion industry and one of the most fragmented parts of financial services. We’re powering a more transparent, compliant, and consumer friendly future and seeking smart, driven and passionate colleagues to roll up their sleeves and join us in this mission. In under two years since launching: * We’ve grown to over $10M+ in ARR * Signed enterprise deals with some of the largest consumer lenders in the country * Reached over 2 million U.S. consumers, powering everything from payments to personalized support * Achieved cash flow positivity, giving us control over our own destiny * Raised $65M from top tier investors who believe in our long term vision * Processed more than $150M in loan payments and flagged $30M+ in fraud attempts using real-time AI systems * Identified over 35,000 compliance violations through automated regulatory intelligence
