Senior/Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Hedra is a pioneering generative media company backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building Hedra Studio, a multimodal creation platform capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

At the core of Hedra Studio is our Character-3 foundation model, the first omnimodal model in production. Character-3 jointly reasons across image, text, and audio for more intelligent video generation — it’s the next evolution of AI-driven content creation.

As a Senior/Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own the reliability, availability, and operability of our core Python web services running at scale on AWS.

You will be responsible for designing, maintaining, and improving the production infrastructure that keeps Hedra online: Kubernetes for orchestration, AWS as the core cloud platform, and Postgres on RDS as a key managed data service. Your work will focus on building a highly available runtime environment for our services, ensuring we can ship quickly while staying resilient through incidents, traffic spikes, and growth.

You will design robust deployment patterns on Kubernetes, optimize our use of AWS (networking, load balancing, scaling, resilience), and put in place the observability and alerting we’re currently missing — from system-level metrics to product health signals. You’ll also partner with product engineers to make Python a great place to build: smoothing out CI/CD, runtime configuration, and production debugging.

This is a hands-on infrastructure role, not a product feature role. You will work closely with engineering leadership and product teams, but your primary mandate is to keep our services healthy, observable, and ready to scale. We're looking for a full-time hire in our San Francisco office.

We’re looking for candidates who have:

• At least 4+ years in infrastructure / SRE / platform / backend operations roles at technology companies

• At least 3+ years running a critical Python web application in production on AWS

• Strong experience operating services on Kubernetes, including:

  • Designing deployment strategies (rolling, blue/green, canary)

  • Autoscaling, resource limits/requests, capacity planning

  • Debugging pod/node issues and cluster-level problems

• Solid experience with AWS for high availability, such as:

  • Multi-AZ architectures, load balancers, security groups, IAM basics

  • Using managed services (RDS, S3, queues, caches, etc.) effectively

  • Understanding maintenance windows, failure modes, and regional/AZ considerations

• Experience improving observability for production systems:

  • Implementing or refining system metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network, pod/node health)

  • Adding application and product health metrics (latency, error rates, key business KPIs)

  • Standing up useful dashboards, traces, structured logging, and actionable alerts

• Comfort working with Python services at scale:

  • CI/CD pipelines, dependency management, runtime configuration

  • Performance tuning, concurrency models, and production debugging

• Practical experience with Postgres on RDS:

  • Running it reliably in production (backups, restores, monitoring, failover)

  • Coordinating version upgrades and schema changes with minimal disruption

• A developer experience mindset:

  • Making it easier and safer for engineers to deploy and operate services

  • Improving tooling, scripts, and workflows around our infrastructure and observability

• A pragmatic approach to reliability and incident response:

  • Participating in or leading on-call rotations and incidents

  • Running postmortems, designing runbooks, and putting guardrails around risky operations

• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate with product engineers and other stakeholders on tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and complexity

• Competitive compensation and equity.

• 401k.

• Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental).

• Lunch and snacks at the office.
  

We encourage you to apply even if you don't fully meet all the listed requirements; we value potential and diverse perspectives, and your unique skills could be a great asset to our team.