Founding IT and Production Operations Engineer

Hiring: Founding IT & Production Operations Engineer | Stealth AI Wearable Startup Location: San Francisco (hybrid; on-site presence required during launch stage) Visa: No visa support We’re partnering with a pre-launch AI wearable startup building a next-generation personal intelligence platform combining AI software with consumer hardware. As the company prepares for its US launch, the team is looking for a Founding IT & Production Operations Engineer to take ownership of its US production environment. Certain sensitive production systems and user-data environments need to remain under US-based control. The global R&D team will therefore rely on this person to handle production-related operational requests, troubleshooting, deployments and system access. This is a hands-on IT / production operations role, rather than a research-heavy engineering or AI development position. What You’ll Do • Operate and support the company’s US production environment • Act as the primary US-based technical operator for sensitive production systems • Support production deployments, releases and routine infrastructure tasks • Handle log lookups, monitoring queries and first-line troubleshooting • Manage production access, permissions and basic security controls • Support operational requests from the international R&D team where direct production access is restricted • Maintain appropriate audit records for access and production activities • Support security monitoring and incident response • Escalate more complex engineering issues to the relevant development or infrastructure teams • Collaborate closely with engineering teams across the US and Asia What they’re Looking For • 2–5+ years of experience in IT Operations, DevOps, Cloud Operations, Production Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering or SRE • Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP or Azure • Comfortable working with production environments, logs, monitoring tools and access-control systems • Familiarity with CI/CD and software deployment processes • Strong troubleshooting skills and ability to operate independently • Good understanding of security, permissions and handling sensitive information • Comfortable working in an early-stage startup environment Nice to Have • Kubernetes or containerized infrastructure • Encryption or key-management experience • Security operations or privacy-related infrastructure experience • AI agents, MCP or LLM tool-calling exposure • Experience with AI products, connected devices, wearables or consumer hardware This role is ideal for someone who is practical, hands-on and reliable, and who enjoys owning production operations without needing to focus heavily on R&D, architecture or advanced AI development.