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Salary: USD 225,000 - 275,000 / annual
Harper is building AI-led commercial insurance distribution at scale, with 90%+ of workflows driven by AI rather than legacy human processes. The company adds ~1,000 customers per month and has grown 100x year-over-year. You'll lead the platform engineering function that underpins the entire engineering organization.
The Role
You'll own three interconnected areas: (1) infrastructure—cloud platforms (AWS/Railway), third-party vendor integrations, and operational systems; (2) developer productivity—building AI-first tooling and harnesses that enable other engineering teams to move faster; and (3) SRE and production support—establishing production discipline and observability as Harper scales to handle thousands of AI-driven decisions daily.
The team is currently 2 people and will grow to 5–6 over the next three months. This role is open to both experienced engineering managers and strong individual contributors ready to transition into management. You'll be hands-on from day one—working directly alongside engineers, doing infrastructure work yourself, and building the systems that compound velocity across the entire organization.
Key Responsibilities
- Own cloud infrastructure, vendor management, and operational tooling
- Build and maintain developer productivity platforms and AI harnesses
- Establish SRE practices, on-call rotations, SLAs, and SLOs
- Grow the team from 2 to 5–6 engineers over three months
- Stay hands-on: code, troubleshoot, and ship alongside your team
- Scale each function (infrastructure, developer productivity, SRE) into larger sub-teams over time
Requirements
- At least 2 years as a line manager directly managing teams of 6–10 people, OR clear readiness to transition into that role with strong IC credentials
- Hands-on experience with AWS or GCP; strong database troubleshooting skills
- Experience operating at real scale (1M+ requests per minute)
- Proficiency troubleshooting across databases, networking, compute, Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure layers
- Deep knowledge of on-call practices, SLAs, SLOs, and SRE methodologies
- Genuine interest in both infrastructure and developer productivity/AI tooling
- Appetite for speed and hypergrowth execution
Nice to Have
- Network for hiring or comfort partnering closely with recruiters
- Experience building developer productivity tooling and AI harnesses
- Track record building teams from very small bases
- Prior startup experience, especially in hypergrowth phases
