Lead DevOps Engineer
We're looking for an ambitious, hands-on Lead DevOps Engineer to build and scale the reliability and infrastructure function at ARIMLABS.
Our platform runs AI coding agents in cloud sandboxes, many times in parallel, to build and quality-check reinforcement-learning tasks for frontier AI labs. Every run is real, paid compute. The platform ships to production continuously, and it has to stay working and available while it is being built. This is an opportunity to own that from zero to one, establish the practices from scratch, and potentially grow into leading the team that keeps it running.
What You'll Do
Build reliability from 0 to 1: Establish on-call, incident response, SLOs and runbooks where none exist yet, and keep the platform available while it changes underneath with heave AI coding.
Scale the platform horizontally: Move process-local coordination into shared state, so our workers can run as many replicas without double-booking capacity or paying for work twice.
Run the data layer: Own PostgreSQL, Redis and the job queue in production, including connection budgets, pooling, migration safety, backups and restore drills.
Make failures loud: Build observability with Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana that ends at a person who can act, not at a dashboard.
Own the DevOps foundation: CI/CD in GitHub Actions, infrastructure as code with Terraform on GCP and Render, reproducible container images, and secrets management.
Treat cost as an engineering metric: Find the unit drivers behind hosting, network, sandbox and model spend, and change the system to move them.
Shape the future team: Hire and grow the engineers who join after you, and potentially lead the function as it expands.
What We're Looking For
Proven production experience: A track record of running production systems as an SRE, DevOps or platform engineer, with real on-call ownership.
Strong Python: Including asyncio. Many of our reliability fixes live in application code, and you'll write and review them. We're AI fans - if you can vibecode and automate your work - we'll support that.
Solid infrastructure fundamentals: PostgreSQL, a job queue (arq, Celery, Sidekiq, Temporal or similar), Linux and containers, Terraform and GitHub Actions.
Builder mentality: You enjoy taking a fragile system and turning it into a dependable one, step by step, without stopping the business.
Strong ownership and autonomy: You take responsibility for the things nobody else sees, because you see them. You drive them to measurable results without constant supervision.
Scalable thinking: You design for the platform at ten times today's volume, not only for this week.
Ambition and drive: A highly motivated, resourceful and results-oriented person who wants to grow quickly, works hands-on, and is ready to lead a team forward.
We value demonstrated achievements, intellectual curiosity and the ability to execute over years of experience or impressive job titles.
Nice to Have
Experience building an SRE or DevOps function from scratch, particularly in a startup or high-growth company.
Experience combining hands-on engineering with team leadership.
Experience running fleets of ephemeral sandboxes or CI runners (Firecracker, Daytona, E2B, Modal, Kubernetes job runners).
Experience operating LLM- or agent-heavy workloads: rate limits, token budgets, cost per run.
A track record of cutting a cloud bill substantially by finding what actually drove it.
GCP experience (IAM, GCS, GCE, Cloud Run).
Comfort working alongside AI coding agents, and reviewing their output critically.
Why Join ARIMLABS?
Build something from scratch: Take ownership of an entire engineering function and decide how our platform is run.
Exceptional growth opportunities: Join a fast-scaling AI research company at an early stage, grow alongside the business, and potentially lead your own team.
High autonomy: Freedom to experiment, make decisions and build systems without unnecessary bureaucracy.
Work with exceptional people: Collaborate with highly skilled researchers, engineers and domain experts working on challenging problems at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Exposure to frontier AI: Run infrastructure where frontier AI agents do real work every day.
Entrepreneurial environment: Work in a company that values initiative, speed, ownership and ambitious thinking.
Career flexibility: Shape your long-term career toward reliability and platform leadership, or broader engineering leadership, as the organization expands.
Compensation & Working Conditions
Engagement: B2B contract.
Compensation: Competitive fixed compensation. Additional bonuses for defined milestones
Time off: 24 days of paid time off annually.