Founding DevOps Engineer

About Retell AI

At Retell AI, we're not just automating calls—we’re transforming how the world communicates. Our AI voice agents are reshaping sales, support, and customer engagement for leading brands. Backed by Alt Capital, Y Combinator, and top-tier investors, we've raised $4.7M in seed funding and hit $14M ARR with just 12 people.

We’re one of the fastest-growing Voice AI startups and we're on a mission to become the standard for voice automation at scale. We're also one of the top ranking startups at https://leanaileaderboard.com/.

About the Role

As a Founding DevOps Engineer, you’ll be the owner of our build, release, and runtime foundations. You’ll design and automate deployment pipelines for both cloud SaaS and on-prem environments, orchestrate containers at scale, and ship reliable releases that meet compliance requirements. You’ll work cross-functionally with product, security, and customer teams—then turn what you learn in the field into reusable platform capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Own CI/CD end-to-end: design, implement, and operate pipelines with blue/green, canary, and phased rollouts; define graceful draining for HA systems.

• Architect, maintain, and harden Kubernetes-based runtime (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm), including multi-cluster and multi-tenant concerns.

• Manage cloud deployments across AWS/Azure/GCP and coordinate with on-prem infrastructure teams; standardize with IaC (e.g., Terraform).

• Implement robust observability (metrics, logs, traces), SLOs/error budgets, and automated rollback/one-click restore.

• Partner with compliance to integrate SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA controls into pipelines (artifact signing, SBOMs, change management, access/keys).

• Deploy at customer sites (cloud or on-prem), collaborating with client teams for integration, runbooks, and handover.

• Lead incident response & postmortems; drive resilience, cost, and performance improvements.

• Document release processes and platform conventions; codify best practices into tooling and templates.

You Might Thrive If You

• Have deep hands-on experience with a major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Helm).

• Build production-grade CI/CD with GitHub Actions / GitLab CI / Jenkins (or similar), including complex rollout strategies.

• Have shipped both SaaS and on-prem solutions, navigating networking, security, and environment drift.

• Can integrate compliance and security into delivery (secret management, image signing, policy-as-code).

• Are comfortable with networking fundamentals, security hardening, and performance tuning.

• Communicate clearly, move fast in ambiguity, and enjoy being the responsible adult in prod.

Job Details

• Job Type: Full-time, 70 hr/week (50 hr/week onsite with flexible hours + 20 hr/week work from home)

• Cash: 215k - 290k

• Equity: 0.3 - 0.6%

• Location: Redwood City, CA, US

• US Visas: Sponsors Visa & Green Card

Other Benefits

• 100% medical, dental, vision insurance coverage

• Unlimited breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks

• Gym and daily commute fee reimbursement

• Internet and phone bill covered

Compensation Philosophy

• Best Offer Upfront: Choose from three cash-equity balance options, no negotiation needed.

• Top 1% Talent: Above-market pay (top 5 percentile) to attract high performers.

• High Ownership: Small teams, >$1M revenue/employee, and significant equity.

• Performance-Based: Offers tied to interview performance, not experience or past salaries.

Interview Process

1. Online Assessment (25–30 min): One HackerRank coding questions on practical problem-solving (7 days to complete).

2. Technical Phone Interview 1 (30 min): Live coding on CoderPad, focusing on data structures and algorithms.

3. Technical Phone Interview 2 (30–45 min): Full-stack development with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and Node.js in a local environment.

4. Onsite/Virtual Interviews (2-3 hrs): Hosted in our office if located in the Bay Area or virtual, with three rounds:

   1. DevOps Build & Run: Design a Kubernetes deployment with blue/green, draining, and a 2-hour instance lifetime constraint; walk through rollout/rollback.

   2. Communication (FDE-style): Partner exercise on explaining trade-offs and aligning stakeholders.

   3. Systems Design (DevOps): Architect a generalized on-prem solution deployable across multiple clouds with different data stores, key vaults, encryption, availability/failover, monitoring, upgrades, and maintenance.

Learn More

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Join Retell AI to shape the future of voice automation, building scalable, impactful full-stack systems that redefine AI-driven communication.