Level

Sierra

Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Sierra is hiring a Software Engineer, Infrastructure in San Francisco, United States. It pays $230k-$390k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Sierra.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
  • The listed pay starts 37% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include OpenAI, Clay and Terraform.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 209 other open roles at Sierra.

AI in this role

Build and scale cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and LLM inference serving for an AI agent platform.

openaiclayterraform
ai-agentsllm-inferencedistributed-systemskubernetesci-cd

About us

Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

What you’ll do

As a Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Sierra, you will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the core systems that make our AI platform possible. You’ll focus on making Sierra’s infrastructure secure, reliable, and scalable, enabling product teams to deliver with speed and confidence.

  • Ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of our platform and LLM inference serving as we rapidly grow traffic.

  • Build and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform to ensure scalable, secure, and reproducible environments.

  • Create and maintain a self-serve infrastructure platform that enables the rest of engineering to deploy and operate services.

  • Own and evolve CI/CD pipelines and release management, enabling fast, reliable deployments for Sierra’s platform.

  • Architect and operate distributed systems that leverage distributed databases, retrieval systems, and ML models.

  • Develop and maintain core data serving abstractions along with authentication and security features (SSO, RBAC, authentication controls).

  • Navigate and integrate our stack with enterprise customer environments in scalable and maintainable ways.

  • Enhance observability tooling (metrics, logging, tracing) to provide deep visibility into platform health and performance.

  • Lead and participate in incident management, improving system resilience through proactive monitoring, root cause analysis, and postmortems.

What you’ll bring

  • Strong software engineering background with 5–7+ years of hands-on development experience in highly technical products.

  • A strong inclination towards building automation, tooling, and platform, along with designing maintainable systems.

  • Proven experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure as code (Terraform preferred).

  • Hands-on expertise in CI/CD systems, release management, and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

  • Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.).

  • Experience in incident response and operating distributed systems in production.

  • Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience

Even better…

  • Production experience working with LLMs and machine learning models.

  • Background in distributed systems, running SaaS services at scale, and agentic architecture.

  • Familiarity with security and authentication protocols (OAuth, SSO, mTLS).

  • Previous experience in a fast-paced startup environment or platform/infra-focused team.

Our values

  • Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

  • Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

  • Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

  • Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

  • Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

  • Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

  • Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

  • Life insurance and disability benefits

  • Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

  • Parental leave

  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

  • Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

  • Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

  • Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

How we rate this

Software Engineer, Infrastructure at Sierra rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agentsLLM InferenceDistributed SystemsKubernetesCI/CDOpenAIClayTerraform

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$230k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 37% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Tell me about a project where llm inference was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where kubernetes was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where ci/cd was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, LLM Inference, Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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