Software Engineer, Infrastructure
The RoleThis is a staff-level infrastructure generalist role. You will set the technical direction of Outtake's infrastructure and build the systems that support our next orders of magnitude of growth. The role begins as an individual contributor position; experience growing and leading infrastructure teams will be valuable as the function scales.
Outtake needs to search, process, and investigate billions of pieces of content quickly. You will own the foundations that determine how this data is stored, indexed, retrieved, and moved; how asynchronous work is scheduled and executed; and how our systems use cloud compute, storage, and networking.
This is a software engineering role. You will design and build production infrastructure systems, expose them through clear internal interfaces and abstractions, and lead the migrations required to adopt them.
What You'll Do- Set the technical direction for Outtake's infrastructure across databases, search and retrieval, data processing, asynchronous execution, and cloud architecture.
- Redesign our search and retrieval systems to support fast investigation across billions of pieces of content.
- Evolve our relational database architecture through sharding, partitioning, indexing, caching, and new data-access patterns.
- Own the application and infrastructure changes required to migrate live systems safely, including changes to service topology and deployment strategy.
- Design and build scalable asynchronous systems for scheduling, queues, workflows, retries, backpressure, rate limiting, and failure recovery.
- Build data infrastructure for high-volume ingestion, streaming, batch processing, enrichment, and reprocessing.
- Develop shared infrastructure services, APIs, libraries, and primitives that product engineers can use without needing to understand the underlying implementation.
- Own the cloud foundations required by these systems, including compute, storage, networking, isolation, resource management, and deployment architecture.
- Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions and make tradeoffs across latency, throughput, consistency, durability, cost, and complexity.
- Work across engineering teams to identify repeated infrastructure problems and turn them into reusable systems.
- Operate the systems you build, use production evidence to improve their architecture, and automate recurring operational work.
- Write technical proposals, establish architectural standards, and guide other engineers through complex systems decisions.
- As the infrastructure foundation matures, we expect to grow this into a broader infrastructure team with dedicated ownership across data systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer platforms.
What We're Looking For- Experience operating at staff scope: identifying important technical problems, setting direction across team boundaries, and leading complex projects from design through adoption.
- A track record of designing and building distributed infrastructure systems used by other engineers or products.
- Experience scaling production systems through significant increases in data volume, traffic, or workload complexity.
- Deep knowledge of relational database architecture, including data modeling, access patterns, indexing, partitioning, sharding, caching, and migration.
- Experience building or evolving high-throughput asynchronous systems, with a strong understanding of scheduling, ordering, retries, idempotency, backpressure, and partial failure.
- Experience with large-scale search and retrieval systems, including the tradeoffs among lexical search, vector retrieval, indexing speed, freshness, relevance, and cost.
- Experience building ingestion, streaming, or batch-processing systems for large data volumes.
- Work across the underlying cloud infrastructure when changes to compute, storage, networking, or deployment architecture are required to scale our data systems.
Life at Outtake- Office: For those in NY, we are an in-person team (5 days a week, with flexibility as needed) working out of a stunning waterfront office in Brooklyn. Collaboration, speed, and clarity matter.
- Health: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision for employees.
- Time Away: Flexible PTO. We trust adults to manage energy, not clock time.
- Culture & Team: Annual company retreats and regular in-person events.
