Opportunity

Senior SRE at AI Startup Cresta – ML Infra Career in Columbus

Location Columbus
Company Cresta
Source jobicy
Posted 2026-10-28 14:54:47

Career & Market Insight

Role Level & Market Positioning: This is a senior-level (5+ years) Staff/Senior SRE/DevOps role at a well-funded AI startup (Series C+, $270M raised). The tech stack — Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GitOps, ML infrastructure — is highly in-demand and aligns with the top tier of infrastructure engineering salaries. Canadian market benchmarks for this profile sit around CAD $130,000–$175,000; equity at a Sequoia/a16z-backed company at this stage adds meaningful upside.

Skills You'll Build:

  • ML/AI infrastructure is a fast-growing specialization — building GPU clusters and large-scale ML pipelines is among the most sought-after DevOps skills in 2024–2025.
  • Multi-cloud Kubernetes at production scale and GitOps maturity (Flux/Argo) are highly portable and valued across FAANG and hyperscalers.
  • Exposure to a product used by enterprise clients (United Airlines, Marriott) adds credibility to your portfolio.

Culture Signals: "Collaborative but highly autonomous" and "freedom to pursue interesting projects" suggest a startup culture that values initiative. The team appears lean, offering high ownership per engineer — a strong career accelerator for senior engineers who want broad impact.

Green Flags: Stanford AI Lab pedigree, strong investor backing, high-profile enterprise customers, and a CEO from Google's AI division signal organizational credibility. Watch for: No published salary range and no explicit mention of on-call policies — ask recruiters directly about compensation bands and incident response expectations.

Cresta unlocks the true potential of the customer experience, turning every conversation into a competitive advantage. Cresta's unified AI platform combines conversational AI agents, real-time human agent augmentation, and comprehensive conversation intelligence to drive revenue and efficiency gains across every channel. The world's leading companies, including United Airlines, Cox Communications, and Marriott, use Cresta to power world-class customer experiences every day.

Born from the Stanford AI Lab, Cresta has raised more than $270 million from the world's leading investors, including a16z, Greylock, and Sequoia. Cresta's leadership includes some of the leading minds in AI today. Our CEO, Ping Wu, founded and led Google's Contact Center AI and Vertex AI platforms before joining Cresta to build the future of AI-driven customer experiences.

Over the next few years, AI is going to redefine how people all over the world interact with businesses every day. Come build that future at Cresta.

About the role:

As a member of the infrastructure team you are responsible for designing, building, and advancing our core infrastructure that allows the engineering team to execute quickly, productively, and securely. You will join a collaborative but highly autonomous working environment in which each member has a defined role with clear expectations, as well as the freedom to pursue projects they find interesting.

Responsibilities:

  • Developer Toolchain. Partner with engineers to build dev tools that empower developer workflows and deployment infrastructure.
  • Ensure reliability of multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters and pipelines.
  • Metrics, logging, analytics, and alerting for performance and security across all endpoints and applications.
  • Infrastructure-as-code deployment tooling and supporting services on multiple cloud providers.
  • Automate operations and engineering. Focus on automation so we can spend energy where it matters.
  • Building machine learning infrastructure that enables AI teams to train, test, and deploy on large-scale datasets.

What we are looking for:

  • 5+ years experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Production Engineering, or equivalent field.
  • Deep proficiency with coding languages such as Golang or Python.
  • Deep familiarity with container-related security best practices.
  • Production experience working with Kubernetes, and a deep understanding of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including popular open-source tooling such as cert-manager or external-dns. Experience with GPU-enabled clusters is a bonus.
  • Production experience with Kubernetes templating tools such as Helm or Kustomize.
  • Production experience with IAC tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
  • Production experience working with AWS and services such as IAM, S3, EC2, and EKS.
  • Production experience with other cloud providers such as Google Cloud and Azure is a bonus.
  • Production experience with database software such as PostgreSQL.
  • Experience with GitOps tooling such as Flux or Argo.
  • Experience with CI/CD such as GitHub Actions.

Perks & Benefits:

  • We offer Cresta employees a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit you and your family's needs.
  • Paid parental leave to support you and your family.
  • Monthly Health & Wellness allowance.
  • Work from home office stipend to help you succeed in a remote environment.
  • Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees.
  • PTO: 3 weeks in Canada.

Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable. Your recruiter can provide further details.

This posting will be used to fill a newly-created role.

Our use of AI in recruiting: We may use AI tools in our recruiting process, which require human review and oversight. If you have questions about our use of AI or wish to opt out, please contact [email protected] (if you are opting out, please use the subject 'Opt-Out' in your email).

Recording & AI transcription: We do not authorize candidates to record or use AI transcription of any interview by phone, notetaker app, AI glasses, or other device. Candidates may request an exception or accommodation for review during the interview process as needed.

Recruiting impersonation scams: We have noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where scammers attempt to access candidates' personal and financial information through fake interviews and offers. All Cresta recruiting email communications will always come from the @cresta.ai domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Cresta via other sources should be ignored.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this role fully remote or does it require office attendance?
The posting mentions a work-from-home office stipend and lunch reimbursement only for in-office employees, indicating the role is primarily remote with optional in-office attendance available.
Is this position open to candidates outside Canada?
Based on the job posting, this role is listed specifically for Canada, including PTO structured under Canadian standards. Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.
Does Cresta offer equity as part of the compensation package?
Yes, the posting explicitly states that compensation includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits, though specific amounts are determined by the recruiter.
What cloud platforms will I work with in this role?
The primary platform is AWS (IAM, S3, EC2, EKS), with production experience in Google Cloud and Azure listed as a bonus. The role involves multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure.
Is experience with GPU clusters required for this position?
GPU cluster experience is listed as a bonus, not a requirement. The core requirements focus on Kubernetes, Terraform/CloudFormation, AWS, and GitOps tooling.
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