Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

Sierra Sierra · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Engineering

Sierra is seeking a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments of their AI platform. This role involves architecting, deploying, upgrading, and managing infrastructure in enterprise environments, ensuring security and compliance. The engineer will also develop standards, tooling, and processes for scalable and repeatable deployments, collaborating with various internal teams and customer stakeholders.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own deployment architecture conversations and execution — designing and implementing deployment strategies across customer environments, including VPC configuration, permissioning, networking, and infrastructure provisioning.
  2. Manage the full infrastructure lifecycle for some of Sierra’s most critical customers: initial deployment, ongoing upgrades, scaling, and incident support.
  3. Develop and maintain deployment runbooks, upgrade procedures, and automation tooling to make operations repeatable and reliable.
  4. Partner with engineering teams to ensure Sierra's platform is deployable and operable across diverse customer requirements.
  5. Work with customers' platform engineering, security, and DevOps teams to navigate their infrastructure constraints and compliance requirements.

Skills

Required

  • 4+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or solutions architecture roles
  • Significant time spent on customer-facing deployment work
  • Deep experience with AWS services, Terraform, container orchestration, and cloud networking (VPCs, IAM, DNS, load balancing)
  • Track record of managing deployments in customer-owned cloud environments
  • Ability to navigate ambiguity with enterprise stakeholders
  • Strong operational instincts
  • Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment and collaborating across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams
  • Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience

Nice to have

  • Hands-on experience with Go services, GraphQL APIs, or LLM infrastructure in production environments
  • Past experience at an early-stage company where you built deployment operations, playbooks, and tooling
  • Familiarity with observability and incident management in distributed systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar)
  • Experience with CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation, or infrastructure self-service tooling for enterprise customers

What the JD emphasized

  • security, compliance, and operational requirements
  • security reviews, compliance requirements, and change management processes
  • infrastructure constraints and compliance requirements