Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About SandboxAQ

SandboxAQ is a high-growth company delivering AI solutions that address some of the world's greatest challenges. The company’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) power advances in life sciences, financial services, navigation, cybersecurity, and other sectors.

We are a global team that is tech-focused and includes experts in AI, chemistry, cybersecurity, physics, mathematics, medicine, engineering, and other specialties. The company emerged from Alphabet Inc. as an independent, growth capital-backed company in 2022, funded by leading investors and supported by a braintrust of industry leaders.

At SandboxAQ, we’ve cultivated an environment that encourages creativity, collaboration, and impact. By investing deeply in our people, we’re building a thriving, global workforce poised to tackle the world's epic challenges. Join us to advance your career in pursuit of an inspiring mission, in a community of like-minded people who value entrepreneurialism, ownership, and transformative impact.

The Opportunity

The Cybersecurity Group at SandboxAQ is looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to build the engineering platform for AQtive Guard, our groundbreaking Cryptographic Posture Management and AI Security Posture Management products. As we deploy globally with major organizations like top-tier financial institutions and government agencies, the speed, quality, and security of our software delivery are critical to our success.

As we scale our SaaS product globally to major financial institutions and government agencies, we face complex challenges in security, latency, and reliability. We treat infrastructure as a product.

In this role, you will engineer a self-service Cloud Platform as a product. You will write software to automate infrastructure provisioning, build Kubernetes operators, and create internal APIs that allow our services to scale autonomously. You will apply software engineering rigor—testing, modularity, and versioning—to our infrastructure codebase.

We are looking for a builder who thinks in distributed systems, not just configuration files. If you are passionate about writing code to solve infrastructure problems and architecting multi-region environments that require zero human intervention, this role is for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineer the Platform: Design and build our internal self-service Cloud Platform as a Product. You will develop production-grade software that automates the provisioning, scaling, and lifecycle management of our global infrastructure.
• Architect Scalable, Resilient Cloud: Lead the design of highly available, multi-region cloud architectures (AWS/GCP) for low-latency, high-throughput security services, making key decisions on distributed systems, state management, and disaster recovery.
• Extend Kubernetes: Build and maintain custom Kubernetes Controllers, Operators, and CRDs to orchestrate complex, stateful workloads and enforce best practices automatically.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Rigor: Apply software engineering standards to IaC. Architect reusable Terraform/OpenTofu modules, implement automated infrastructure testing (Terratest), and enforce GitOps (ArgoCD) for deterministic deployments.
• Build Developer Tooling: Design and code CLIs, APIs, and SDKs to abstract infrastructure complexity for product engineers while enforcing security and compliance guardrails.
• Drive Technical Excellence: Mentor engineers on cloud-native patterns, review infrastructure code, and champion a culture of automation.

Essential Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of production experience in an Infrastructure, Platform, or Developer Productivity role
• Strong proficiency for developing SDKs, CLIs or APIs (Go, Python, Kotlin)
• Extensive experience designing, building, and maintaining complex orchestration pipelines
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes, containerization and container orchestration
• Production experience with large scale distributed systems
• Experience managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with tools like Terraform, Helm
• Extensive cloud provider experience with AWS or GCP

Highly Desired Skills & Experience

• Production experience building artifacts in a monorepo
• Production experience with any hermetic build system, but especially Bazel
• Experience managing and securing data infrastructure like Kafka and Postgres at scale
• Familiarity with service mesh technologies such as Istio
• General knowledge of cryptography

Why Join Us?

We offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support your health, financial well-being, and life outside of work.

• Compensation: Competitive base salary, performance-based incentives or bonuses (where applicable), and equity participation.
• Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents with generous employer premium contributions, retirement savings with company matching, paid parental leave, and inclusive family-building benefits.
• Work-Life Balance: Flexible paid time off, company-wide seasonal breaks, and support for flexible work arrangements that enable sustainable performance.
• Career Development: Opportunities for continuous learning and growth through on-the-job development, cross-functional collaboration, and access to internal learning and development programs.

SandboxAQ Welcomes All

We are committed to fostering a culture of belonging and respect, where diverse perspectives are actively sought and valued. Our multidisciplinary environment provides ample opportunity for continuous growth - working alongside humble, empowered, and ambitious colleagues ready to tackle epic challenges.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status.

Accommodations: We provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in job application procedures for open roles. If you need such an accommodation, please let a member of our Recruiting team know.

Read: Guidance for candidates on using AI Tools in interviews

Compensation Range: $168,300 - $276,000