Founding Platform / Infra Engineer

The foundation of the modern global economy is built on a dense network of counterparty trust and risk. In the past 50 years, companies have evolved from relying on a couple of wholesalers and vendors, to utilizing 100+ SaaS vendors, contract partners, and cloud providers. Since each counterparty has their own idiosyncratic internal processes and risk profiles, businesses end up spending millions of dollars and countless man-hours conducting due diligence.

Coverbase’s mission is to streamline this business-to-business assessment, reducing human toil, and allowing organizations to work together safely and reliably. We employ modern AI techniques to organize vast amounts of unstructured data and compare them against policies to identify key risks to the business.

We already serve customers across Fortune 500 companies in insurance, higher education, and finance — including five of the top 25 banks in the US.

Our proven leadership team brings deep experience:

• Clarence (CEO): Co-founder & former CTO of Unit21, a Series C fraud detection company that has raised ~$92M.

• Kao (CTO): Previously led the Stripe engineering team that launched Banking-as-a-Service.
  

We’ve raised $20M from world-class investors and our team of 12 have built important products at Google, Mapbox and Waymo.

We’re looking for our Founding Platform / Infra Engineer – a strong software engineer first. You can design, build, and evolve the systems, tooling, and infrastructure that make every other engineer more effective at Coverbase.

This isn’t a traditional DevOps or SRE role. You’ll be hands-on in code, but thinking in systems: how services are deployed, observed, scaled, and supported as we grow. You’ll lay the technical foundations that let us move fast and stay stable.

• Manage and evolve our infrastructure — from compute and storage to networking and deployments.

• Improve system observability by defining and monitoring service health metrics, ensuring we can see and understand how our systems perform in real time.

• Enhance our CI/CD and deployment utilities to make releases faster, safer, and more reliable.

• Contribute directly to developer experience and velocity by smoothing workflows, refining automation, and improving the overall developer journey.

• Bring a builder’s mindset: ship pragmatic, stage-appropriate systems that scale with us.

We’re looking for folks who care not just about their work, but the people around them — we’re building a team that’s as kind as they are talented.

Day to day, you’ll:

• Scale infrastructure using repeatable, environment-aware patterns for safe staging, preview, and production rollouts.

• Enhance reliability by defining service health metrics, improving alerting, and leading incident response + postmortems.

• Strengthen access hygiene by championing least-privilege defaults, secret rotation, and cleaner permission boundaries.

• Improve observability by building actionable dashboards and alarms, and creating light daily/weekly system health signals to keep the team oriented.

• Improve release safety through progressive delivery and automated post-deploy checks.

• Boost developer velocity by optimizing CI/CD workflows and documentation.

• Support communications by incorporating a lightweight status/incident update path customers can trust.

• Lead foundational projects as our analytics and batch workloads grow – setting standards for scalability and foundational developer resources

Success looks like a platform that’s predictable, observable, secure by default, and fast to iterate on.

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including platform, infrastructure, or systems work.

• You have strong software engineering foundations — you’re fluent in your dev environment, confident with git, write and review clean code, and debug systematically.

• You’ve built, deployed, and operated production systems end-to-end.

• Experience with:

  • Languages: Python, TypeScript

  • Infra & IaC: AWS or GCP, Terraform/Pulumi, Docker, ECS/EKS

  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions

  • Observability: CloudWatch, Sentry, Fullstory

  • Security & Ops: IAM, secrets management, vulnerability remediation

• Pragmatic, curious, and comfortable in the ambiguity of an early-stage startup.

• Excited to build systems for other engineers, not just manage legacy infrastructure.
  

• Experience working in a seed to Series C startup as the first Platform / Infra Engineer.

• Located in the San Francisco Bay Area and willing to go back into the office in a Hybrid model once the physical office opens.

• Experience working with founders and leadership team regularly.

• You’ll define how we build, ship, and scale software as we grow — from scratch.

• You’ll act as both architect and builder, blending SWE depth with system intuition.

• You’ll collaborate closely with CTO, CEO, leadership regularly as well as product engineers, helping them move faster and safer.

• You’ll shape not just infrastructure, but engineering culture.

Strong product addressing a latent market demand: Our AI-driven platform is transforming third-party risk management (TPRM) for top-tier financial institutions. Customers describe it as “revolutionary” and “a joy to work with,” and we’re just getting started.

Here’s what some of our customers had to say about our product, unprompted:

• “This is a revolutionary product… Coverbase is the single biggest step forward in TPRM I’ve seen in my career”

• “You’re flipping the entire program upside down, we completed the risk assessment in 1.5 days… would otherwise have taken at least 3 weeks”

• “Love how responsive you are, it’s been a joy to work with you guys”
  

Early-Stage Impact: This is a rare opportunity to shape the trajectory of a company at the forefront of AI innovation. Your work will directly influence our success and define how we grow.

Collaborative Team: Join a tight-knit, mission-driven team that values kindness, creativity, and curiosity as much as expertise. You’ll work closely with the founders and an exceptional group of engineers.

• $170K to $240K base depending on experience and ability

• Meaningful founding team equity.

• Health insurance (100% employee / 80% dependents).

• 21 days PTO.

• In-person gatherings within the U.S. (travel covered) every 3-5 months. We’ll give plenty of notice for it, and cover flights and accommodation. We expect you to attend!

• 401(k) with 4% matching.

Location: San Francisco, Hybrid
Reports to: CTO, Co-Founder

Coverbase Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.