Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud & Reliability
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Summary
Hands-on senior SRE role owning the reliability, performance, and cost of the AWS production infrastructure behind Vantaca's HOAi AI products: infrastructure as code, PostgreSQL/Redis operations, observability, incident response, cost optimization, and security posture. Based in Palo Alto with remote flexibility and real on-call.
HOAi is the fastest-growing company revolutionizing the community association management industry. Our AI workforce platform integrates machine learning technology to streamline labor-heavy processes, eliminating inefficiencies and driving scalability. With rapid growth in the AI space, we are pushing boundaries to redefine industry standards. HOAi Agents go beyond traditional AI by proactively executing complex, multi-step processes with human-like reasoning—working autonomously, 24/7, across your entire operation. This transformation optimizes labor costs, enables growth without additional hires, and ensures faster, higher-quality service for residents and board members.
HOAi was acquired by Vantaca in the fall of 2024. Vantaca just achieved unicorn status with a $1.25B valuation, so it's safe to say we're past the "scrappy startup phase." We're not just building a successful company – we're building the category-defining platform that will transform how an entire industry operates.
Here's the reality of our trajectory:
- Growing 100% year-over-year
- Our AI product (HOAi) went from $0 to millions in months
- Backed by Cove Hill Partners and JMI Private Equity
- 6M+ doors on our platform, displacing legacy systems
Overview
You will own the reliability, performance, and cost of the production infrastructure behind HOAi's AI products. Our agents make decisions that property managers act on and our voice agents talk to residents in real time — which means downtime and latency are not abstractions here, they're customer conversations that fail.
This is a hands-on senior role with real ownership. You'll set the reliability bar for a platform growing fast enough that last quarter's architecture is already under strain, and you'll be the person other engineers come to when production behaves in ways nobody predicted.
What You'll Own
- Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure as Code: Design and evolve our AWS architecture. Own our infrastructure-as-code footprint, environment topology, and the standards that keep it coherent as the org grows.
- Reliability & Incident Response: Own our uptime posture end to end: autoscaling policies for variable workloads, failover and graceful degradation, circuit breakers and retry semantics, disaster recovery with tested restore paths. Participate in and improve our Sev1/Sev2 process, run post-mortems, and drive the follow-through that keeps the same incident from recurring.
- Observability: Own monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting across the stack. Build dashboards that answer questions rather than decorate walls, and tune alerting so that a page means something. Extend observability to token consumption and model spend so AI cost is a first-class operational metric.
- Production Database Operations: Own PostgreSQL and Redis as production infrastructure: instance sizing and topology, replication and read replicas, connection pooling, failover and point-in-time recovery, version upgrades, Diagnose query pathology when it surfaces as an incident and partner with product pods on the fix.
- Cost Efficiency: Treat infrastructure spend as an engineering problem. Instrument it, attribute it, and reduce it without trading away reliability.
- Security Posture: Own runtime security for our infrastructure: IAM and least privilege, network boundaries, secrets management, patching cadence, and vulnerability remediation. Support security audits and produce infrastructure control evidence.
Expectations for Success
- Uptime and error budget performance for mission-critical services
- Time to detect and time to resolve for production incidents
- Recurrence rate of previously post-mortemed failures
- Infrastructure cost efficiency, including cost attribution by workload
- Database performance and headroom under growth
- Alert signal-to-noise and on-call load
Requirements
Required
- 8+ years in infrastructure engineering, SRE, or DevOps
- Deep AWS expertise, with production ownership rather than adjacency
- Infrastructure as code in production at scale
- Production operation of PostgreSQL — not just querying it, but sizing, tuning, replicating, and recovering it
- Real on-call experience for a system with meaningful uptime expectations
- Demonstrated cost optimization work with numbers attached
- Strong debugging instincts in distributed systems: able to reason from symptom to root cause without a runbook
Strongly Preferred
- Cloud security posture work: IAM design, secrets management, audit support
- Experience supporting real-time or latency-sensitive workloads
- Datadog or comparable APM in a primary-owner capacity
- Experience in a company that outgrew its original architecture and had to fix it while running
Skills & Competencies
- Debugs complex distributed systems and finds root causes
- Obsessed with latency, throughput, and resource efficiency
- Defaults to automating repetitive work and building scalable solutions
- Understands security implications and implements best practices by default
- Explains complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
- Takes initiative to identify and solve problems before they become critical
- Comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities in a fast-moving environment
What We Value
- Extreme ownership: Takes full responsibility for outcomes, not just inputs
- Customer-focused: Understands how infrastructure decisions impact end-user experience
- Data-driven: Makes decisions based on metrics and evidence
- Continuous learner: Stays current with evolving technologies and best practices
- Quality-focused: Builds systems that are reliable, maintainable, and elegant
- Velocity-minded: Balances speed with quality; ships incrementally and iterates
- Bar raiser: Sets and maintains high standards; elevates team performance and output quality
- Strong delegator: Empowers others effectively; distributes work based on strengths and growth opportunities
Why You Should Join Our Team
- Our eNPS is +68! (Google it, that is great).
- Benefits: Medical, Dental, and Vision kick in day one.
- Unlimited PTO (with a requirement for employees to take a minimum of one continuous week per year).
- 401K with Company Match.
- Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed.
- Great parental leave benefits.
- Named on Inc 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.
- Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row.
- Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category.
- Active employee-led Culture Committee.
- Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees.
- Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community.
- We’re playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We’re building something cool and people like it here.
The base salary range for this position is $200,000-$260,000/year. Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience and qualifications. Vantaca offers comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and Principal; Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts; a 401(k) plan with company match (up to 3% after one year, with Vantaca covering all administrative fees); and at no cost to you: life and short term disability insurance, telemedicine through Teladoc, and an Employee Assistance Program providing 24/7 access to counseling, financial planning, legal services, and family support resources.
We receive many resumes for our open positions and each one is reviewed by a human being on our recruiting team. We will compare your background with the qualifications and requirements for the position.
If you are selected for an interview you will receive an e-mail from someone on our recruiting team with an @vantaca.com email address. It may take some time for us to review all of the applications so give us some time to respond. We appreciate your interest in this role.