Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform at AfterQuery Inc., you will be at the forefront of designing, building, and scaling the foundational infrastructure that underpins our cutting-edge AI research and development efforts. This pivotal role involves architecting and implementing the core systems that power our data generation, evaluation, and agentic AI systems, enabling our engineers and research teams to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence.
• • You will take ownership of the shared platforms that are critical for executing large-scale human-in-the-loop workflows, robust evaluation harnesses, and highly efficient automated data pipelines. These systems are instrumental in training frontier AI models, making your contribution directly impactful to the advancement of AI capabilities.
• • This is a deeply technical position offering broad ownership and significant influence. You will be responsible for architecting and developing foundational infrastructure components that a diverse range of engineers will rely upon daily. Your primary focus will be on ensuring these systems are not only scalable and reliable but also capable of handling extremely high-throughput workloads, a critical requirement for modern AI development.
• • You will have the unique opportunity to work directly with the founding team, contributing to the definition of system architecture, the establishment of robust engineering best practices, and the construction of the essential infrastructure that will support the next generation of AI development. This collaborative environment fosters innovation and allows for direct impact on the company's technical direction.
• • At AfterQuery, we are a dedicated research lab focused on exploring the frontiers and capabilities of artificial intelligence through the creation of novel datasets and rigorous experimentation. Our primary clientele consists of leading foundation model labs, and we proudly serve all of the frontier AI labs, positioning us at the heart of AI innovation.
• • Based in San Francisco, CA, AfterQuery has secured significant funding from prominent investors, including Y Combinator and BoxGroup, as well as contributions from former partners at Lightspeed and Index Ventures, and senior leadership from industry giants like Google DeepMind and Meta GenAI. This strong backing underscores the immense potential and strategic importance of our work.
• • The founding team brings a wealth of experience from prestigious organizations such as Jane Street, Meta, Citadel Securities, Google, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Silver Lake, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), ensuring a high-caliber team environment.
• • The opportunity at AfterQuery is massive. We were recognized as one of the fastest-growing YC companies in our batch, and our ambition is to become one of the fastest-growing YC companies of all time. Joining us now means being part of a trajectory of exponential growth.
• • Your impact will be foundational. You will own and architect core infrastructure systems from the ground up, directly shaping the technological backbone of our platform and its future capabilities.
• • We offer competitive compensation, including a competitive salary and meaningful equity, providing you with a stake in our success. As we scale, you will have unparalleled opportunities to shape the engineering organization, define technical roadmaps, and lead major technical initiatives, fostering significant professional growth.
• • You will be working alongside a strong team comprised of world-class engineers and researchers with extensive experience from leading tech companies and financial institutions, creating a dynamic and intellectually stimulating work environment.
• • Key responsibilities include designing and building core infrastructure systems, architecting and developing the shared infrastructure that powers our data generation platforms, human-in-the-loop systems, and evaluation pipelines. You will also develop scalable distributed systems capable of processing large-scale datasets and high-throughput workloads with strong reliability guarantees.
• • Furthermore, you will build internal platforms and shared services, creating reusable infrastructure and APIs that empower product engineers and researchers to develop rapidly and reliably on top of our core systems. Optimizing performance and reliability through systems with strong observability, monitoring, and fault tolerance is paramount for supporting production workloads at scale.
• • You will own infrastructure architecture, helping to define the long-term system architecture across data pipelines, compute infrastructure, task orchestration, and storage systems. Collaboration across engineering and research teams to support new AI experimentation workflows and platform capabilities will be a daily activity.
• • Finally, you will play a crucial role in establishing engineering best practices, defining standards for system design, deployment, reliability, and infrastructure operations, ensuring a high bar for quality and maintainability across the organization.