Director of Platform Engineering

Cruitical is hiring on behalf of an AI infrastructure company building the routing layer between applications and the model providers behind them. One interface, every vendor, with the operational tooling that makes running LLMs in production survivable. They're venture-backed, still a team you could count on two hands, and expecting to roughly double over the next year. Everyone's decisions still show up in the product.

The Role:

You own the platform underneath a product whose entire value proposition is reliability. When an LLM router goes down, every application on top of it goes down with it, so the infrastructure work here is the product work.

That means the deployment story, the observability, the cost and latency characteristics of routing traffic across providers, and the operational discipline a team gets to inherit as it doubles. It's a Director title, but at this size it's a building role first.

Month 1: You know where the platform is fragile and you've fixed the thing that would have woken someone up at 3am.

Month 3: Deploys are boring, the team can see what the system is doing without asking you, and the platform decisions you've made are holding as engineering headcount grows.

Who thrives here:

• You've owned production infrastructure where downtime was somebody else's outage. Multi-tenant, latency-sensitive, and consequential. You can talk through a real incident and what you changed afterward.
• You're still hands-on. At this size the Director title describes scope, not distance from the work. You'd be writing the automation, not reviewing someone else's.
• You have opinions about running LLMs in production. Cost, latency, failover across providers, and what breaks when a vendor degrades rather than fails cleanly.

Some nice-to-haves:

• Experience at an infrastructure or developer-tools company rather than an application one
• Multi-cloud or multi-vendor failover design
• Having been early enough somewhere to set the standards rather than inherit them

Why this role?

Every company building on LLMs eventually hits the same wall: vendor lock-in, unpredictable cost, and no way to reason about reliability across providers. This company sells the answer to that, and it's early enough that the platform underneath is still yours to define.

Small team, real backing, and a title with genuine scope rather than a layer of management above the work. You'd report into the founder directly.

This role requires being in Northern California and commuting to San Francisco three to four days a week. That's a hard requirement rather than a preference.

About the hiring process

This role is being filled through Cruitical's assessment platform. Everyone who applies gets an actual shot at the role and guaranteed actionable feedback.

Instead of screening on a resume, you'll complete a structured work simulation that mirrors the actual job. You'll work with real tools, solve an ambiguous problem, and demonstrate how you think. The company gets signal on what you can actually do. You get signal on whether this is work you'd enjoy.

Candidates who move forward complete a short technical exercise from the company's own repository, followed by a paid full day on site in San Francisco working alongside the team. The company pays for that day.

You do this once, and we match you to fitting jobs at accelerated stages. Fair, and fast, for everyone involved.

Apply here or reach out to learn more about the company.