Founding Platform Engineer

The Denominator · Remote (Preferred: San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Austin or Boston) · Full-time

We believe tomorrow will be better than today, and we build with that conviction. We have a small team and a large thesis, and we intend to define the category.

If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box — we’re looking for candidates who are particularly strong in a few areas, and have genuine interest and capability in others.

About the Role

The Denominator is building from first principles at the intersection of AI-native operations, web infrastructure and data. We are looking for a founding platform engineer to own the systems every other part of the company runs on: the infrastructure behind our web properties, the AI agents that run our daily workflows, the data pipelines under every decision, and the security standards enterprise customers will audit. You will be the authority on how the company builds, deploys and observes software. The foundations you lay this year will carry the company through its next stages of growth.

What You’ll Do

• Own the cloud and deployment platform end to end (hosting, DNS and CDN, infrastructure as code) and the CI/CD pipelines that take a change from pull request to production in minutes
• Build and operate the orchestration layer for the AI agents that run the company’s daily workflows: scheduling, retries, human approval gates, spend controls and audit logs across model providers
• Build fast, server-rendered web properties that every search engine and AI crawler can read: performance budgets, structured data, sitemaps and feeds, crawler analytics, and uptime that holds under traffic spikes
• Own the data platform: event collection, a data warehouse, product analytics and the pipelines that keep every dashboard and data product honest
• Set the security baseline an enterprise buyer will audit: identity and access, secrets management, encryption, vendor review, incident response and the path to SOC 2
• Build the observability stack (logs, traces, metrics, alerting and cost monitoring) and own reliability targets for every customer-facing service

What You’ll Bring

The Toolkit

• 5+ years of platform, infrastructure or site reliability engineering, including systems you owned in production, not just contributed to
• Deep proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python, and fluency in Go or another systems language
• Production experience with serverless and edge platforms alongside container workloads
• Infrastructure as code and CI automation as a daily habit, and environments you can rebuild from scratch
• Hands-on experience running LLM-backed workloads in production: rate limits, model routing, caching, evaluation hooks and spend controls
• Working knowledge of web performance and technical SEO: server-side rendering, Core Web Vitals, structured data and how crawlers read a site
• Security fundamentals: least-privilege access, secrets management, audit logging and the controls behind SOC 2

The Denominator DNA

• You hold infrastructure to a high bar: if it is not measured, it is not known
• You learn what the business needs from the platform before you choose the tools
• You use AI to automate the toil, and you know which decisions must stay with a person
• You own what you build, from the first commit to the 3 a.m. page
• You believe the right foundation makes everything after it faster, and you build like it

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience running content-heavy web properties where search and AI-engine visibility drive growth
• Production experience with agent frameworks or durable workflow engines
• Experience taking a company through SOC 2 Type II or a comparable audit
• Familiarity with email delivery (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and identity providers
• Prior experience at a company with fewer than 20 engineers; you have shipped systems without a platform team underneath you

Working at The Denominator

• Board-level impact from day one: your work reaches the CIOs, CFOs and boards making AI decisions within months, not years
• Fully remote, with a preference for San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Austin or Boston; the right candidate can be located anywhere
• A direct line to the decisions: no layers between your judgment and the product

Compensation

• $170,000 – $220,000 • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus

Compensation decisions are based on various factors, including, but not limited to, experience, skills, certifications, location and business needs. Employees may be eligible for additional benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, a 401(k), paid holidays and paid time off, and professional development opportunities and tools.

About The Denominator

The Denominator is building the intelligence company for the AI economy. Enterprises are committing trillions to AI, and the executives accountable for that capital must move at pace, keep their options open and answer for the return. We build the empirical intelligence that lets them decide with conviction, preserve optionality in every technology choice and deploy capital with discipline. Learn more at thedenominator.ai.

To apply, write to careers@thedenominator.ai with the role in the subject line.

The Denominator is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.