Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Hud in San Francisco, CA

Job description

About HUD HUD's mission is to build reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI data. We want data to be valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. Our team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers and operators building the economy that shapes what AI will become. Backed by $16M from top VCs and YC (W25), our marketplace and platform are used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs. About the role We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure who can own the reliability, scale, performance, and developer experience of HUD’s core infrastructure and backend systems. This is not a pure infrastructure role. The right person has strong production infra experience, but also thinks like a backend engineer: they can reason about service architecture, queues, databases, APIs, deployment safety, performance bottlenecks, and how product requirements translate into resilient systems. You’ll work across AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and backend services to make HUD faster, more reliable, cheaper to run, and easier for engineers to build on. Responsibilities • Own production uptime, latency, provisioning speed, infrastructure cost, and incident response for core platform services • Build and maintain AWS infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Helm, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, networking, and secrets management • Design and improve backend and platform systems for scale, including capacity planning, autoscaling, queueing, backpressure, cleanup jobs, retries, and rollback paths • Define and improve dashboards, alerts, logs, traces, SLOs, runbooks, and on-call workflows so failures are detected, debugged, and resolved quickly • Build reliable CI/CD, release automation, environment management, and deployment workflows that improve developer productivity and reduce production risk • Write clean, maintainable code where needed to automate systems, improve backend services, and create internal tooling Experience You may be a good fit if you: • Have owned production cloud infrastructure for a high-availability, user-facing platform, with responsibility for uptime, performance, deployment safety, and cost • Have deep experience with AWS infrastructure and containerized systems; experience with tools like Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, load balancers, networking, and secrets management is strongly preferred • Have built or operated CI/CD, environment management, release automation, observability, alerting, and incident response systems • Have strong backend engineering judgment and can reason about service architecture, APIs, databases, async systems, queues, scaling limits, and production failure modes • Can write clean, maintainable code and apply strong software engineering judgment across product architecture, infrastructure, backend systems, and developer workflows Strong candidates may also have: • Experience operating infrastructure for data-heavy, ML/AI, workflow, marketplace, developer-tools, or enterprise platforms • Experience designing systems for bursty workloads, long-running jobs, sandboxed execution, distributed workers, or high-concurrency services • Experience reducing cloud spend through better architecture, autoscaling, workload placement, caching, cleanup systems, or observability • Experience building internal platforms or tools that make engineers faster without hiding too much complexity We prioritize technical aptitude, ownership, and learning potential over years of experience. Team & company details • Team Size : ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote. • Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), the former #1 ranked Catan player in the world, serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc. • Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and qui