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Salary: USD 255,000 - 315,000 / annual
Gray Swan is building AI safety and security infrastructure for frontier AI labs. The company evaluates AI models and develops real-time threat detection and adaptive adversarial red teaming agents. With ~60 employees and strong funding, Gray Swan is growing rapidly and directly influencing how the world deploys AI systems at scale.
You will lead an infrastructure engineering team responsible for building and scaling the systems powering Gray Swan's AI security platform. This role combines technical leadership with people management, focusing on enterprise infrastructure, backend services, and cloud architecture that enable safe deployment of frontier AI models.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading, mentoring, and developing a team of infrastructure engineers with emphasis on ownership and technical excellence
- Setting technical direction and priorities for enterprise solutions in partnership with engineering leadership
- Overseeing design, development, and operation of highly available backend services and distributed systems
- Guiding the team in scaling cloud infrastructure across Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, networking, storage, and compute
- Driving development of internal platform services and infrastructure tooling to improve developer productivity
- Establishing engineering practices around observability, monitoring, incident response, and operational excellence
- Partnering with ML, security, and product engineering teams to build infrastructure for complex AI workloads
- Identifying opportunities to improve system performance, reliability, scalability, and efficiency
- Defining long-term architecture and technical strategy while balancing immediate priorities
- Participating in hiring and building a world-class infrastructure organization
- Providing technical guidance during production incidents and leading post-incident reviews
- Communicating infrastructure strategy, tradeoffs, and risks across engineering and company leadership
You'll work in a fast-moving startup with significant ownership and ambiguity, directly shaping how Gray Swan's infrastructure organization evolves.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of experience building enterprise solutions with backend infrastructure or distributed systems in production
- 2+ years of experience managing, mentoring, or leading software engineering teams
- Strong technical background in infrastructure, distributed systems, backend engineering, or platform engineering
- Strong programming experience in C/C++, Go, Python, Rust, Java, or similar language
- Experience operating production services on Kubernetes and modern cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Deep understanding of networking, distributed systems, containers, service orchestration, and scalable architectures
- Experience designing and operating APIs, microservices, asynchronous systems, and event-driven architectures
- Strong understanding of reliability, observability, security, and performance at scale
- Comfortable debugging production systems alongside your team
- Strong people leadership skills with ability to coach engineers and help individuals grow
- Ability to balance technical depth with effective delegation and team leadership
- Excitement for fast-moving startup environment with significant ownership
BONUS EXPERIENCE:
- Managing infrastructure or platform teams supporting ML or LLM workloads
- Infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform)
- Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or similar distributed data systems
- Building internal developer platforms or platform engineering organizations
- Cloud security, infrastructure hardening, or zero-trust architectures
- Scaling infrastructure through rapid company or product growth
- High-growth startup or zero-to-one product building experience
- Interest in AI safety, cybersecurity, or adversarial machine learning
