This listing pays about $235,000 a year. Across 754 open software engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $157,500 to $251,500 and the median is $197,500. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 19% above the median.

Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.

Software Engineer 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.

Check how this applies to your own job

Skills this job asks for

Say which you have and which you want to build. We use it to match you to jobs like this one.

About the job

ABOUT BRETTON AI

Bretton runs AI-native operations for the financial back office. OCC, Fed and FDIC regulated banks use Bretton AI to run compliance, risk, fraud, and operations on one platform, on their own data and policies, with every output traced, cited, and audit-ready.

We’ve raised over $95M from Greylock, Y Combinator, Thomson Reuters Ventures and other top tier investors. We’re based in downtown San Francisco and our team comes from world-class organizations like Google, Netflix, Stripe, Plaid, Brex, and more.

THE ROLE

As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you will own the foundation that enables us to deploy secure, compliant AI systems at major financial institutions fighting financial crime at a massive scale. Our infrastructure is built on a modern, container-native architecture, leveraging Docker and Kubernetes to deliver consistent, auditable deployments across diverse customer environments.

You will work directly with our largest customers—institutions serving over a billion people—to architect, automate, and harden our on-premises and cloud environments to meet the strictest regulatory and performance requirements, including SOC 2 compliance. Your work will be informed by real customer needs and will ship to everyone, so you must build enterprise-grade systems, work effectively with engineering and customer teams, understand financial services compliance, and adapt quickly.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Own and evolve our Kubernetes infrastructure, including cluster management, service mesh configuration, and container security policies.

- Design and implement progressive delivery pipelines with canary deployments, automated rollbacks, and deployment health validation.

- Build and maintain our observability infrastructure in Datadog, including dashboards, monitors, SLOs, and distributed tracing.

- Drive incident response for high-severity outages and proactively model capacity needs for low-latency AI inference.

- Architect and automate secure infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code for VPCs, IAM policies, Kubernetes manifests, and private cloud deployments.

- Maintain and improve the infrastructure controls that support our SOC 2 compliance posture.

- Lead customer engagements for enterprise rollouts and mentor mid-level engineers on infrastructure best practices.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

MUST-HAVES:

- 8+ years in infrastructure engineering or DevOps at high-growth or hyperscale companies.

- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes, including production cluster management, Helm, and service mesh technologies.

- A proven track record of architecting and operating AWS (preferred), GCP, or Azure at an enterprise scale.

- Experience with observability platforms, preferably Datadog (metrics, logs, APM, distributed tracing).

- A strong background in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) and safe deployment practices (progressive delivery, canary deployments, GitOps, automated rollbacks).

- "Battle scars" from leading outages, capacity events, and large-scale incident reviews.

- Strong programming skills in Python.

BONUS POINTS:

- Familiarity with TypeScript.

- Direct involvement in SOC 2 or other compliance audit preparation or remediation.

- Direct experience with private-cloud or on-premises deployments for regulated customers.

- Previous experience at startups scaling infrastructure from the early stages to the enterprise level.

- A background in fintech or building systems for highly regulated industries.

- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure and model deployment at scale.

WHY YOU’LL LOVE WORKING HERE

- Build for Scale: You thrive at the intersection of technical leadership and customer impact, building systems that enable rapid development while maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance, and reliability.

- Infrastructure as a Product: You see infrastructure as a product for your engineering peers and understand the value of platform automation in enabling developer velocity.

- High-Impact Work: Your contributions will have a direct, measurable impact on how financial institutions adopt AI to fight crime.

- Mentorship and Leadership: You are comfortable balancing technical excellence with mentoring others and leading customer engagements.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- $200k - $270k + equity

- Onsite in our San Francisco office 4 days a week, with one flex day

- We sponsor H-1B transfers; we're unable to sponsor new H-1B petitions or green cards

- Comprehensive healthcare, 401k matching, commuter benefits

- 15 days PTO + holidays, unlimited sick days

- Flexible leave options

- Working late? We’ve got you covered with DoorDash and an Uber home

Join us in building AI that protects the global financial system from financial crimes that fund terrorism, human trafficking, and other serious threats.