Infrastructure Engineer

The Role

You build and maintain the infrastructure that every KI-direct project runs on. Cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, deployment tooling, monitoring, and platform reliability — across MABOS, Annex, and whatever the founder builds next.

In a bootstrapped environment, infrastructure has to be efficient, reliable, and cost-conscious from day one. You don't get to throw money at problems. You engineer around them.

Responsibilities

• Design and manage cloud infrastructure across all KI-direct projects
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment workflows
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems
• Optimize for cost, latency, and reliability in a bootstrapped environment
• Support federated and self-hosted deployment models for decentralized projects
• Harden security posture across all infrastructure layers

Requirements

• 5+ years infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering
• Cloud-native. Deep experience with AWS, GCP, or equivalent. IaC with Terraform, Pulumi, or similar
• Container orchestration. Kubernetes, Docker, and the tooling around them
• Security-first. You think about attack surface, secrets management, and access control by default
• Cost-conscious. You can architect for reliability without burning through a budget that doesn't exist yet

Compensation

Equity in Kuykendall Industries and salary upon revenue. No salary today. This is a bootstrapped company. The founder has been building everything without funding, without a team, and without a paycheck from this entity. You enter that same environment.

Who this works for: Someone with savings, consulting income, or another reason they can afford to work for equity in the near term. Someone who looks at the scope of what's been built, understands the commercial potential, and makes a calculated bet.

Who this does not work for: Someone who needs a paycheck on day one. Someone who treats equity as a consolation prize. No judgment — but don't waste your time or ours.

The Builder Clause

We don't care where you went to school. We don't care if you went to school. Our founder is self-taught, started coding at 13, and built a 602,000-line cognitive architecture without a CS degree.

Meet the qualifications, or show us what you've built. Either path works. Both paths demand excellence.

Apply

Ready to move? Send a short note of relevant proof-of-work — past shipped projects, metrics you moved, or a draft of your first 30 days.