Senior Infrastructure Engineer

About the Role

As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Bland, you'll help us to build the backbone that enables millions of AI-powered phone conversations. You're not just keeping servers running, you're architecting distributed systems that handle real-time voice processing, scale ML inference, and integrate with enterprise telephony infrastructure. Your work directly determines whether our platform can handle business-defining call volumes for our customers, or leaves them with dead air.

What You'll Do

• Contribute to the designing of scalable architecture: Build distributed systems using Kubernetes that handle high-volume, real-time voice processing with strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Build and Support ML infrastructure: Create and optimize the infrastructure supporting our AI models, from training pipelines to real-time inference serving across multiple regions.
• Integrate with telephony: Maintain robust connections between our platform and complex enterprise phone systems, SIP trunks, and VoIP infrastructure.
• Recognize Flaws, Control for them: We’re building a new type of architecture that takes something from Column A, and Column B. We’re never going to get it perfect, so you’ll be helping us keep a look out for what we need to solve.
• Ensure reliability: Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems that keep our platform running 24/7 with enterprise-grade uptime.
• Scale with growth: Anticipate and solve scaling challenges before they become problems-our call volume grows exponentially and infrastructure needs to stay ahead.
• Security and compliance: Implement security best practices and compliance requirements for enterprise customers in regulated industries.

Interesting Problems to Own

• Old-Meets-New: Telephone calls have been around for awhile. Now, with an explosion in modern technologies, comes interesting new ways to wrangle old-school protocols and techniques. You’ll have the space to be creative and really own a new emergent type of architecture.
• Sizable Call Volumes requires new approaches: Understand and deeply invest in ensuring that we match any amount of customer’s customers call volume! We need unique solutions, that you’ll help us discover along the way.
• Streaming Architectures: On top of building to support our APIs, you’ll also be building to helping maintain the reliability, failover, and scaling of our important stream-based traffic.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Infrastructure expertise: 5+ years building and scaling distributed systems, with deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP preferred).
• You “get” the fundamentals, and beyond: For example, you can casually tell someone how TLS works beyond buzzwords, do a quick sketch of how different load balancing strategies work, or even tell us the obscure thing you fell asleep reading about last night. There isn’t a blank stare, there’s an excitement to share.
• Real-time systems experience: You've built systems that handle high-throughput, low-latency workloads, streaming, real-time processing, or similar.
• Startup mentality: You've worked at fast-growing companies where you wear multiple hats and solve problems as they come up.
• You’re opinionated, but you’re not alienating: You accept that opinions drive progress, but you don’t intend to break into alienating discussions at the risk of not finding compromises for our customers.
• You’re familiar with some tools/components like: Cloudflare, HAProxy, Go, TypeScript, Datadog, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Nvidia Hardware (nvlink for example), and anything in between.

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience with telephony systems (SIP, VOIP, WebRTC.)
• Background in ML infrastructure, model serving, or GPU computing.
• Experience with real-time audio/video processing.

Benefits and Pay

• Healthcare, dental, vision, all the good stuff
• Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company
• Every tool you need to succeed
• Beautiful office in Levi's Plaza, SF with rooftop views

• If you don't have the perfect experience that is fine!
• We're a bunch of drop-outs and hackers.
• Working at a start-up is really hard.
• We work a lot and we figure things out on the fly.

Compensation Range: $120,000-$200,000