Senior Cloud Operations Engineer (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States

US base salary: $174,000–$261,000 per year, plus bonus, equity, and benefits.

Company

X is a group of inventors and entrepreneurs building high-impact technologies. The Bellwether team develops machine-learning and geospatial products for understanding and predicting severe weather events such as wildfires.

What you will do

• Architect, deploy, and manage scalable, high-throughput, low-latency, multi-region cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code.
• Lead cloud architecture initiatives across microservices, serverless systems, networking, and zero-trust security.
• Build self-service internal developer platforms and improve CI/CD capabilities, automation, and developer experience.
• Design observability frameworks using metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and continuous profiling.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, and lead root-cause analysis and blameless post-mortems for critical incidents.
• Establish FinOps practices covering cost attribution, capacity planning, right-sizing, lifecycle policies, and committed-use strategies.

Requirements

• Master's degree or equivalent practical experience in computer science.
• Industry experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure, preferably with Kubernetes.
• Experience using Terraform across multiple environments and understanding cloud networking fundamentals including VPCs, BGP, service mesh, DNS, and CDN.
• Experience managing high-throughput, low-latency architectures handling millions of daily requests or petabytes of data.
• Expertise in distributed systems, load balancing, disaster recovery, fault isolation, and modern cloud security.
• Strong Python and TypeScript skills for APIs, automation tools, CLIs, internal products, and system utilities.

Nice to have

• Experience with Rust.
• Production experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.
• Early-stage startup or 0-to-1 build experience.
• Experience with geospatial data, earth observation datasets, geospatial pipelines, or geo-ML workflows.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a startup-like, high-risk research environment focused on ambitious technological solutions.
• Collaborate across platform engineering, cloud operations, and product delivery.
• Benefits include bonus, equity, and employee benefits.
• Equal opportunity workplace with accommodation support available.