Founding Engineer
Alien — developer infrastructure for shipping software into customers' clouds · 3 employees · $5M seed
About the role
Alien builds developer infrastructure that lets startups ship software and AI agents directly into their customers' cloud environments. For many enterprise deals, sensitive data can't leave the customer's environment, so Alien provides the layer that makes deployment into customer clouds possible: in essence a modern, AI-era alternative to Terraform. Founded in 2024 and backed by a $5M seed round with angel investors from OpenAI, Google and Databricks, it launched seven months ago, has 10 customers in production and went from zero to $100K ARR in five months.
As a Founding Engineer you'll design and ship the core of the deployment engine, owning hard systems problems across AWS, Kubernetes, GCP and Azure and working directly with very technical, founder-led customers. It's a tiny team where you work directly with the founder, own a significant part of the product and have outsized impact.
The role is for candidates based in the Bay Area or Tel Aviv.
What you will own
- Build core platform and distributed-systems features, mostly in Rust
- Design for every failure mode and edge case across multiple clouds
- Ship at high speed by orchestrating AI coding agents
- Work closely with technical customers on Slack to help them close enterprise deals
- Write clear docs and contribute to developer-facing APIs and open source
Requirements
We interview honestly against this list — if you meet most of the “Must have” rows, apply.
Compensation
Role details
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