Member of Technical Staff - Cloud Infrastructure
Runta
San Mateo, CA · $150k–$250k a year · Posted September 18, 2026
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Where San Mateo, CA ranks
Where San Mateo, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living$216k · of 94
- #1Best cities for finance pay after cost of living$162k · of 35
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Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $200,000 a year. Across 130 open member of technical staff listings that state pay, the middle half runs $208,000 to $270,000 and the median is $240,000. That is 17% below the median, below the middle half of those listings.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Member of Technical Staff salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
BUILD THE EXECUTION LAYER FOR THE AGENT ERA.
Runta builds runtime infrastructure for long-running AI agents: efficient execution, enforceable access controls, and complete execution records.
We’re a small, well-funded team based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Singapore. High talent density. High ownership.
ABOUT RUNTA
Runta builds runtime infrastructure that lets AI agents execute reliably over long time horizons: run agents efficiently, govern what they can reach, and record what they did. Workloads that run for hours or days break the assumptions web infrastructure is built on. An agent can fan out fifty sub-tasks in a second and then go idle for ten minutes, must survive instance recycling mid-run, and needs to snapshot, resume, and branch its execution state the way developers branch code. We’re building the substrate that makes this possible.
We’re a small, well-funded team, moving fast.
THE ROLE
Our runtime team builds the execution engine. You build the cloud platform it runs on: the production infrastructure that serves paying customers. You are the person accountable for it working, scaling, and not bankrupting us.
Runta does three things: run, govern, record. This role makes run economical at scale, gives record a storage layer that’s cheap at volume and fast on restore, and owns the network boundaries that make govern enforceable in production. You decide ECS vs. EKS, when Spot instances make sense, how snapshot storage should be tiered, and what the architecture costs at 10x load.
You’ll also own the infrastructure-as-code layer that makes our platform reproducible and portable. Writing Terraform is table stakes here. The job is designing modules other engineers consume, managing state at scale, and building abstractions that keep multi-cloud on the table without over-engineering for it today.
This is an ownership role, not a support role. The infrastructure layer is part of the product: customer-facing, versioned, reproducible.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Design and operate Runta’s production infrastructure on AWS: compute, networking, storage, observability
- Own the IaC layer: Terraform modules, state management, CI/CD for infrastructure changes
- Design cross-cloud abstractions that don’t lock us into a single provider
- Own the infrastructure side of snapshot/resume/branch: snapshot graph storage, control plane / data plane separation, local ↔ cloud state consistency
- Make cost-aware architecture decisions: instance strategy, Spot fleet design, storage tiering, rightsizing
- Shape the infrastructure roadmap as an early technical leader, working directly with the founder
THE PROBLEMS YOU’D BE SOLVING
- A workload runs anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 hours, unpredictably. How do you size, schedule, and price the fleet under it?
- Agents checkpoint constantly. Snapshot storage must be cheap at petabyte volume but restore in seconds. What’s the tiering design?
- An agent job fans out 50 concurrent sub-tasks, then the whole fleet goes idle for 10 minutes. Autoscaling policies tuned for web traffic fall over. What replaces them?
- Agents retry non-deterministically on failure. Where must the infrastructure itself be idempotent, and where is eventual consistency a silent-corruption risk?
- The same platform needs to deploy identically across environments, and someday across clouds. What do you abstract, and what stays provider-specific?
If you read those and started sketching answers, we want to talk to you.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- You’ve designed and operated production AWS infrastructure you were accountable for, not just worked within someone else’s
- Deep Terraform (or equivalent IaC) experience: complex modules built for other engineers to consume, state management at scale, infra CI/CD
- Multi-cloud or cross-cloud experience: provider-spanning abstractions, workload migrations, or internal platforms built on IaC
- Experience running serverless or container platforms at scale (Lambda, Fargate, ECS, EKS)
- A cost-optimization track record you can talk through in specifics: RI strategy, Spot fleet design, rightsizing with real numbers
- Solid distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, replication, consensus
- You understand orchestration platforms at the why level, not just the kubectl level
Nice to have: background in AI/ML infrastructure, agent frameworks, or LLM serving.
YOU SHOULD GENUINELY CARE ABOUT AI
Our customers are AI builders. The decisions you make (cold-start latency, snapshot frequency, concurrency limits) determine what AI products are possible to build on Runta. The best fit is someone who already uses AI tools daily, tinkers with agents on their own time, and has real curiosity about where agentic systems are going. If AI is “just another workload” to you, this probably isn’t the right role.
THIS ROLE IS PROBABLY NOT FOR YOU IF
- Your infrastructure experience is primarily operating clusters others designed
- Your orchestration background is enterprise application workflow (BPMN, Spring-based orchestration) rather than execution infrastructure
- You’re looking for a role where the architecture is already settled and the job is keeping it running
HOW WE WORK
Small team, high trust, high ownership. We value people who are hungry, humble, and sharp. We look for clear communicators who hold strong opinions loosely and use AI-native workflows in their daily engineering. You’ll work directly with the founder, alongside the core runtime and isolation teams.