Senior DevOps Engineer

About Hedra:

Hedra is a pioneering generative media company backed by top investors at Index, A16Z, and Abstract Ventures. We're building Hedra Studio, a multimodal creation platform capable of control, emotion, and creative intelligence.

At the core of Hedra Studio is our Character-3 foundation model, the first omnimodal model in production. Character-3 jointly reasons across image, text, and audio for more intelligent video generation — it’s the next evolution of AI-driven content creation.

Note: At Hedra, we’re a team of hard-working, passionate individuals seeking to fundamentally change content and build a generational company together. You should have start-up experience and be a self-starter that is driven to build impactful products that change the status quo. The Hedra team is fully in-person in SF/NY with a shared love of solving hard problems using whiteboards.

Summary:

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will bridge the gap between our development and operations teams to accelerate software delivery while maintaining high reliability and security standards. You will design and implement CI/CD pipelines that enable our engineering teams to deploy our transformative AI-powered products rapidly and safely across our infrastructure.
You will work closely with product engineers to streamline the software delivery lifecycle, from code commit to production deployment. Your focus will be on automation, monitoring, and creating feedback loops that enable faster iteration cycles for our Character-3 foundation model and video processing applications. You'll implement deployment strategies, manage release processes, and ensure our development teams can ship features quickly while maintaining system stability.
You will collaborate with engineering teams to break down silos, implement DevOps best practices, and build the automation that supports our rapid innovation cycles. We're looking for a full-time hire in our San Francisco office.

Experience:

• At least 4+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or similar roles focused on software delivery

• CI/CD pipeline expertise designing and implementing automated build, test, and deployment workflows using tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins

• Infrastructure automation using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet to manage configuration and provisioning at scale

• Container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes for deploying and scaling applications efficiently

• Cloud platform proficiency with hands-on AWS experience including EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, and networking services

• Monitoring and alerting implementing comprehensive observability using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, DataDog, or ELK stack

• Release management experience with deployment strategies like blue-green, canary releases, and feature flags

• Scripting and automation proficiency in Python, Bash, or Go for building deployment tools and operational scripts

• Version control and branching strategies implementing GitOps workflows and managing complex release cycles

• Incident response and troubleshooting experience with on-call rotations, post-mortem processes, and system debugging

• Security integration implementing security scanning, secrets management, and compliance checks in CI/CD pipelines

• Performance optimization monitoring application performance and implementing solutions for bottlenecks

• Startup Experience is a must — we work hard and build quickly. Ideal candidates should be passionate with an always-on attitude that drives them to live and breathe the product (not a "punch the clock" disposition)

• Cross-functional collaboration working closely with development teams to understand requirements and implement solutions

• Disaster recovery and backup implementing robust backup strategies and disaster recovery procedures

Personality:

• Self-motivated and independent — able to set accurate timelines for infrastructure projects and deliver on them. Have an opinion and the experience to backup that opinion.

• Low ego, high patience, strong communication skills.

• Understand platform economics and developer productivity short