Salt AI - DevOps Platform Engineer

Salt AI is on a mission to revolutionize life sciences with reliable, collaborative, and forward-thinking AI solutions. Founded by leaders in high-performance computing and AI, we empower teams to achieve breakthroughs faster. Our platform is the backbone for cross-functional collaboration, rapid model interchange, and data integrity—fueling innovation in science and health-tech. Backed by strong VC partners, Salt AI is a team of skilled technologists dedicated to building exceptional user experiences within AI development.

Our platform prioritizes data integrity and reliability, offering a robust, visual-first interface for seamless collaboration and rapid interchangeability of best-in-class AI models.

About the Role:

As a DevOps Platform Engineer at Salt AI, you’ll thrive in an environment where you can independently identify and solve deployment and infrastructure challenges, quickly adapt to new tools, and communicate solutions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. You are a decisive team player who works efficiently under pressure, shares ownership, and consistently focuses on high-impact work—without sacrificing work-life balance.

The Role (What You’ll Be Doing):

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for fast, reliable deployments
• Design and develop Python microservices using Django and FastAPI
• Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS for scalable, high-performance applications
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and observability
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and deployments with Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes
• Ensure robust application security, backups, and disaster recovery strategies
• Collaborate with development and operations teams to improve performance, reliability, and scalability
• Respond to incidents, conduct root cause analysis, and implement measures to prevent recurrence
• Implement automated testing (unit, integration, end-to-end) as part of the deployment pipeline
• Ensure infrastructure and software comply with security standards (authentication, encryption, access controls)
• Maintain clear documentation of infrastructure, deployments, and architecture
• Promote best practices for code quality, infrastructure, and deployment standards

Technical Requirements - Core Skills (Must Have):

• 3–5 years managing cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS
• Extensive experience building CI/CD pipelines with GitLab, GitHub Actions, and similar tools
• Extensive experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes
• Strong experience implementing infrastructure-as-code with Terraform and Helm
• Strong experience designing self-healing Kubernetes systems with probes, autoscalers, affinity rules, and lifecycle hooks
• Proficient in developing Python applications with Django and FastAPI
• Experience leveraging modern AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI to accelerate coding, debugging, and documentation
• Familiar with event-driven architectures and message queues like Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Pub/Sub
• Comfortable working in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments across AWS, GCP, Azure, or on-prem
• Effective communicator and collaborative team player

Preferred / Bonus Skills (Nice To Have):

• Experience with CI/CD and GitOps pipelines using ArgoCD, Argo Workflows, or Atlantis
• Experience with Dapr to build distributed, event-driven microservice architectures
• Experience deploying ML/AI workflows with Kubeflow, MLflow, TensorFlow Serving, or managing data-intensive workloads
• Knowledge of observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, and Datadog, including defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Understanding of compliance and audit standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR
• Exposure to database operations including backups, failover, and tuning for Postgres, MySQL, or NoSQL systems
• Contributed to open source DevOps tooling and automation projects

What Makes You A Great Fit:

• Passionate about streamlining deployment and operations for development teams
• Skilled at automating tasks and building reliable, “just works” infrastructure
• Adaptable, quick to learn new tools, and comfortable with changing requirements
• Able to balance reliability with development speed and communicate technical issues clearly to any audience
• Excited to support AI technology in life sciences and enable rapid innovation through your work

Company Description:

Based in Southern California, Salt AI is pioneering the future of life sciences with advanced AI. Founded in 2024 by Aber Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto—veterans of MySpace, Jam City, Gravity, and Core Scientific—our leadership team brings over 15 years of collaboration. We’re not just building products, but transforming what’s possible in research and discovery. We value diverse perspectives and are