Staff Infrastructure Engineer

About Us

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.

We are:

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding

• Cash flow positive and profitable, with 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.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to architect and own the systems that power Salient at scale. This is a high-impact IC role focused on infrastructure engineering - you'll define how we build, deploy, and operate the infrastructure that processes millions of real financial transactions and customer interactions daily. You'll set the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across the stack to make sure the platform can support whatever we're building next.

Why us?

• We are one of the fastest-growing companies in the Voice AI space. We quadrupled our revenue last year and are now handling close to a million calls per day.

• You’ll have an insane amount of ownership and be part of our journey as we undergo exponential growth, both in business and in engineering.

• We are an AI-native company, constantly staying ahead of the curve in AI tooling and engineering best practices. You’ll play a direct role in driving this forward.

• We have a no-BS culture that is hyper-focused on building a successful (and highly profitable) business.

What You'll Do

• Lead architectural decisions and technical reviews for infrastructure-critical initiatives.

• Design, build, and own the cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) that runs Salient - from compute and networking to storage and observability.

• Develop scalable harnesses that enable coding agents to operate reliably without compromising system stability or code quality.

• Partner closely with the modeling team to optimize the serving and performance of GPU-intensive workloads.

• Drive reliability and performance across the stack by defining SLOs, building robust monitoring and alerting, and leading incident response and postmortems.

• Own developer platform investments that materially improve engineering velocity, including CI/CD, deployment tooling, environments, and internal infrastructure abstractions.

• Establish infrastructure best practices, patterns, and standards as a technical authority across the engineering org.

• Identify and reduce technical debt across infrastructure systems, with a focus on long-term scalability and operational health.

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years at the senior or staff level in infrastructure/platform roles, working on large-scale distributed systems.

• Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) - compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost optimization.

• Expert in infrastructure-as-code, with a strong track record of building scalable automation systems.

• Extensive experience owning and scaling Kubernetes and CI/CD systems in high-throughput, production environments.

• Track record of building and operating high-availability, high-throughput distributed systems with mature observability practices.

• Strong technical communication - able to document architecture clearly and influence engineering decisions across teams.

Nice to Have

• Background in security.

• Exposure to serving AI/ML workloads.

• Combination of big tech and startup experience.

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace and ready to collaborate in person 4 days a week in our San Francisco office with a start time of 8:00 AM.

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.