Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About HUD

HUD's mission is to build reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI data. We want data to be valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. Our team is a quickly growing group of researchers, engineers and operators building the economy that shapes what AI will become. Backed by $16M from top VCs and YC (W25), our marketplace and platform are used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs.

About the role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure who can own the reliability, scale, performance, and developer experience of HUD’s core infrastructure and backend systems.

This is not a pure infrastructure role. The right person has strong production infra experience, but also thinks like a backend engineer: they can reason about service architecture, queues, databases, APIs, deployment safety, performance bottlenecks, and how product requirements translate into resilient systems. You’ll work across AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and backend services to make HUD faster, more reliable, cheaper to run, and easier for engineers to build on.

Responsibilities

• Own production uptime, latency, provisioning speed, infrastructure cost, and incident response for core platform services
• Build and maintain AWS infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Helm, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, networking, and secrets management
• Design and improve backend and platform systems for scale, including capacity planning, autoscaling, queueing, backpressure, cleanup jobs, retries, and rollback paths
• Define and improve dashboards, alerts, logs, traces, SLOs, runbooks, and on-call workflows so failures are detected, debugged, and resolved quickly
• Build reliable CI/CD, release automation, environment management, and deployment workflows that improve developer productivity and reduce production risk
• Write clean, maintainable code where needed to automate systems, improve backend services, and create internal tooling

Experience

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have owned production cloud infrastructure for a high-availability, user-facing platform, with responsibility for uptime, performance, deployment safety, and cost
• Have deep experience with AWS infrastructure and containerized systems; experience with tools like Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, load balancers, networking, and secrets management is strongly preferred
• Have built or operated CI/CD, environment management, release automation, observability, alerting, and incident response systems
• Have strong backend engineering judgment and can reason about service architecture, APIs, databases, async systems, queues, scaling limits, and production failure modes
• Can write clean, maintainable code and apply strong software engineering judgment across product architecture, infrastructure, backend systems, and developer workflows

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience operating infrastructure for data-heavy, ML/AI, workflow, marketplace, developer-tools, or enterprise platforms
• Experience designing systems for bursty workloads, long-running jobs, sandboxed execution, distributed workers, or high-concurrency services
• Experience reducing cloud spend through better architecture, autoscaling, workload placement, caching, cleanup systems, or observability
• Experience building internal platforms or tools that make engineers faster without hiding too much complexity

We prioritize technical aptitude, ownership, and learning potential over years of experience.

Team & company details

• Team Size: ~25 people currently, mostly full-time in-person, but some remote.
• Our team: Our team brings together five International Olympiad medalists across IOI, ILO and IPhO, researchers published at NeurIPS and ICLR, and engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind, Amazon, AWS, Meta, Qwen, GLM, and Mercor. It also includes operators from BCG and Uber, the first security hire at one of the largest crypto exchanges, serial AI startup founders, former quant researchers, artists and the former #1 ranked Catan player in the world.
• Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

Logistics

• Employment: Full-time.
• Location: We have offices in San Francisco or Singapore but are open to remote candidates who can work hours that 70-80% overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones.
• Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.
• Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation
• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision (US and Singapore employees)
• Lunch and dinner for in-office employees
• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays
• 401k with a 4% match
• Other perks including an Equinox membership and commuter benefits (US employees) and a health/wellness stipend (Singapore employees)
• Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. *By unlimited, we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.
• Two top-floor offices in San Francisco’s Union Square and Singapore’s Raffles Place
• Annual travel budget to visit either office

Compensation

Actual offers are adjusted for experience and location, but our base salary bands are

• San Francisco (and other major US cities): $175,000 - $260,000
• Singapore: $130,000 - $195,000
• Rest of world: $105,000 - $195,000

Due to high volume, we may not actively respond to every application, but feel free to contact us at [email protected] or elsewhere if we missed your application!

Compensation: $105K - $260K