Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

What you’ll do

As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer at Sierra, and a founding member of this function, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments, while helping define how Sierra’s AI platform is deployed and operated across enterprise environments. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to architect, deploy, upgrade, and manage Sierra's AI platform infrastructure — ensuring every deployment meets their security, compliance, and operational requirements.

In addition, you’ll establish the standards, tooling, and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable, and partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, Sales, and Customer Success. This role will define how Sierra scales some of its most complex customer engagements.

• Own deployment architecture conversations and execution — designing and implementing deployment strategies across customer environments, including VPC configuration, permissioning, networking, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Manage the full infrastructure lifecycle for some of Sierra’s most critical customers: initial deployment, ongoing upgrades, scaling, and incident support.
• Develop and maintain deployment runbooks, upgrade procedures, and automation tooling to make operations repeatable and reliable.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure Sierra's platform is deployable and operable across diverse customer requirements.
• Work with customers' platform engineering, security, and Dev Ops teams to navigate their infrastructure constraints and compliance requirements.
• Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success to scope infrastructure requirements during pre-sales and onboarding, translating customer needs into concrete deployment plans.

• 4+ years of experience in infrastructure, Dev Ops, platform engineering, or solutions architecture roles — with significant time spent on customer-facing deployment work.
• Deep experience with AWS services, Terraform, container orchestration, and cloud networking (VPCs, IAM, DNS, load balancing).
• Track record of managing deployments in customer-owned cloud environments, including navigating security reviews, compliance requirements, and change management processes.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity with enterprise stakeholders — from platform engineers to CISOs — and turn infrastructure conversations into actionable deployment plans.
• Strong operational instincts: you think about upgrades, rollbacks, monitoring, and failure modes from the start, not as an afterthought.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment and collaborating across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

• Hands‑on experience with Go services, GraphQL APIs, or LLM infrastructure in production environments.
• Past experience at an early‑stage company where you built deployment operations, playbooks, and tooling.
• Familiarity with observability and incident management in distributed systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation, or infrastructure self‑service tooling for enterprise customers.

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full‑time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
• Parental leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full‑time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.