Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

🏢 About Salient

Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
Actively expanding into new financial services segments
Building together in person in San Francisco
We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

🎯 The Role

We're hiring a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to own Salient's cloud footprint across AWS, GCP, and Render. You will make our infrastructure consistent across providers, stay ahead of capacity as call volume and customers grow, make every dollar of cloud spend attributable, and execute on cost-cutting opportunities. You will work directly with engineering, product, and company leadership. You will own outcomes, not tickets: reliability, consistency, capacity, and cost of the platform that runs every borrower conversation Salient handles.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Day-to-day operation of Salient's infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Render, to one consistent standard.
• Infrastructure as code: bringing resources under Terraform (or equivalent), reusable modules, consistent environments, and drift detection.
• Capacity management: forecasting demand, autoscaling, quotas, and headroom for real-time voice and AI workloads.
• Cost attribution and monitoring: tagging, allocation by product and customer, unit-cost metrics, dashboards, budgets, and anomaly alerts.
• Cost reduction: identifying, prioritizing, and shipping savings through rightsizing, commitments, cleanup, consolidation, and provider moves where justified.
• Reliability and observability of the platform, including incident response and post-mortem follow-through.
• Secure, auditable infrastructure that supports SOC 2 and customer security requirements.

📌 Required Qualifications

• You've operated production infrastructure on AWS and/or GCP at meaningful scale, and you're comfortable across providers.
• You manage infrastructure as code and have brought messy, hand-built environments under control.
• You've delivered measurable cloud cost savings and can explain pricing models, commitments, and data transfer costs.
• You've planned capacity for spiky or latency-sensitive workloads and tuned autoscaling in production.
• You build monitoring and alerting that catch problems early, and you lead incidents calmly.
• You design for least privilege, auditability, and safe change management by default.
• You favor simple, consistent systems over sophisticated ones and know what not to build.
• You write clearly and can explain cost and reliability tradeoffs to engineers, finance, and leadership.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with real-time voice, telephony, WebRTC, or streaming systems.
• Experience running GPU or LLM inference workloads, or managing spend on hosted AI APIs.
• FinOps practice experience (e.g., cost allocation programs, FinOps certification) or experience in a regulated industry such as financial services.

🎁 Benefits

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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