Senior/Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Hedra
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
Creation lab building foundation models for next-gen human storytelling
Open for applications
Creation lab building foundation models for next-gen human storytelling
1-20 employees
Open for applications
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
1-20 employees
Company mission
To build foundation models into products that power the next generation of human storytelling.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
Our take
The relationship between machine learning and online content has grown closer in recent years, and Hedra is a video content platform that is pushing this symbiosis into new territory. Describing itself as a video foundation mode company, Hedra is building an online creation studio that helps users generate dialogue, audio and video from words.
As a digital presence automation tool, Hedra is moving beyond the likes of DallE and generative AI video content into more nuanced territory. Its most recent product is Character1, a video foundation model for longer-form video generation focusing on customizable AI-generated video characters.
Since Character1’s release in June 2024, more than 1.6 million videos have been generated via the platform, demonstrating the need for its August seed funding round. The $10 million investment will be channelled into developing new technology like a multimodal studio and workflow tool to complement its foundation model.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2025
$32m
SERIES A
Aug 2024
$10m
SEED
Total funding: $42m
Company benefits
- Equity
- 401k (no match)
- Healthcare (Silver PPO Medical, Vision, Dental)
- Gym access (at our office)
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Michael Lingelbach
(Founder & CEO)Previously Regina Casper Graduate Research Fellow at Stanford University, was an Intern at NVIDIA, Postbaccaulaureate researcher at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Scholar at the Janelia Research Campus.
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