Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About Decagon Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences. Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel. We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others. We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team. About the Team The Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundations that power Decagon: networking, data, ML serving, developer platform, and real‑time voice. We partner closely with product, data, and ML to deliver high‑scale, low‑latency systems with clear SLOs and great developer ergonomics. We organize around five focus areas: - Core Infra: The foundational cloud stack—networking, compute, storage, security, and infrastructure‑as‑code—to ensure reliability, scale, and cost efficiency. - Data Infra: Streaming/batch data platforms powering analytics/BI and customer‑facing telemetry, including for customer‑managed and on‑prem environments. - ML Infra: GPU and model‑serving platforms for LLM inference with multi‑provider routing and support for on‑prem/air‑gapped deployments. - Platform (DevEx): CI/CD, paved paths, and core services that make shipping fast, safe, and consistent across teams. Our mission is to deliver magical support experiences — AI agents working alongside humans to resolve issues quickly and accurately. About the Role We’re hiring a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and operate production infrastructure for high‑scale, low‑latency systems. You’ll own critical services end‑to‑end, improve reliability and performance, and create paved‑paths that let every Decagon engineer ship confidently. In this role, you will - Design and implement critical infrastructure services with strong SLOs, clear runbooks, and actionable telemetry. - Partner with research and product teams to architect solutions, set up prototypes, evaluate performance, and scale new features. - Tune service latencies: optimize networking paths, apply smart caching/queuing, and tune CPU/memory/I/O for tight p95/p99s. - Evolve CI/CD, golden paths, and self‑service tooling to improve developer velocity and safety. - Support various deployment architectures for customers with robust observability and upgrade paths. - Lead infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform) and GitOps practices; reduce drift with reusable modules and policy‑as‑code. - Participate in on‑call and drive down toil through automation and elimination of recurring issues. Your background looks something like this - 8+ years building and operating production infrastructure at scale. - Depth in at least one area across Core/Data/AI‑ML/Platform/Voice, with curiosity to learn the rest. - Proven track record meeting high availability and low latency targets (owning SLOs, p95/p99, and load testing). - Excellent observability chops (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog) and incident response (PagerDuty, SLO/error budgets). - Clear written communication and the ability to turn ambiguous requirements into simple, reliable designs. Even better if you have - Experience being an early backend/platform/infrastructure engineer at another company - Strong Kubernetes experience (GKE/EKS/AKS) and experience across multiple cloud providers (GCP, AWS, and Azure) - Experience with customer‑managed deployments Compensa