Co-Founder — Technical & Product

Co-Founder — Technical & Product

Cairn · Open AI/Data Infrastructure
Website: cairndev.sh
Role: Co-Founder
Type: Founding / Equity
Focus: ML Infrastructure · Distributed Systems · Open Source · Product

About Cairn

Cairn is building an open-source, vendor-neutral control plane for AI and data infrastructure.

Modern AI workloads span Kubernetes, cloud GPUs, training frameworks, workflow engines, data systems, model registries, storage, evaluation, and multiple infrastructure providers.

Cairn provides a common control layer for composing this heterogeneous infrastructure into governed, reusable, installable pipelines—without locking users into a particular cloud or technology stack.

We're looking for a co-founder to help turn this technical foundation into a widely adopted product and company.

The Role

We're looking for a technical co-founder with strong product and business instincts.

You'll work across:

Engineering → Product → Users → Business

This is a hands-on founding role. You'll help shape the architecture, build the product, talk to users, define what we should build next, and help establish the company's direction.

What You'll Do

Build

• Shape Cairn's core architecture and technical direction.
• Build ML/data infrastructure and developer-facing systems.
• Work on capabilities, operators, contracts, pipelines, execution, and integrations.
• Design systems that work across Kubernetes, cloud, on-prem, and different AI infrastructure providers.
• Write production code and review architectural decisions.

Product

• Talk directly with ML/platform engineers and understand their problems.
• Turn infrastructure pain points into simple product abstractions.
• Define Cairn's APIs, developer experience, and workflows.
• Decide what belongs in the core platform versus integrations and extensions.
• Prioritize what to build based on real user needs.

Business

• Identify early adopters and design partners.
• Develop Cairn's initial go-to-market strategy.
• Explore commercial models around the open-source project.
• Build partnerships and integrations.
• Help define Cairn's positioning and long-term company strategy.

Open Source

• Help grow the Cairn open-source ecosystem.
• Build integrations and extension points.
• Work with contributors and early users.
• Communicate Cairn's architecture and vision to the community.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• Strong software engineering background.
• Experience with ML, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Ability to understand complex technical systems quickly.
• Strong product sense.
• Genuine interest in building a company, not just a product.
• Comfortable operating with significant ambiguity and ownership.

Particularly Relevant Experience

Experience with one or more of:

• ML infrastructure / MLOps
• Kubernetes
• Distributed systems
• Cloud infrastructure
• Data platforms
• Model training / evaluation
• Developer platforms
• Workflow/orchestration systems
• Open-source infrastructure
• AI developer tools

You don't need to be an expert in everything above.

We're much more interested in someone who can bridge ML, infrastructure, product, and business.

The Mindset

You naturally ask:

> What problem are we actually solving?

> Who has this problem?

> Is this abstraction useful beyond our own code?

> How do we make this dramatically easier for the user?

You care about technical quality, but you also care about adoption.

You can move from:

architecture diagram → code → customer conversation → product decision

without needing someone else to connect the dots.

Why Now?

AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly heterogeneous.

Teams are combining different:

• models and providers
• training systems
• compute platforms
• data systems
• workflow engines
• cloud and on-prem environments
• evaluation and observability systems

The result is powerful infrastructure that is increasingly difficult to compose and govern.

We believe there is an opportunity for an open, vendor-neutral control plane sitting above this infrastructure.

That's what we're building with Cairn.

What You'll Get

• Founding-level ownership.
• Significant influence over architecture and product direction.
• Equity / founder economics.
• The opportunity to build an open-source infrastructure company from the ground up.
• Direct exposure to users, technology, product, and business.
• A chance to define a new infrastructure layer for AI systems.

This Role Is For You If...

You are excited by the idea of taking a difficult infrastructure problem and asking:

"Can we build the layer that makes all of this simpler?"

And then actually building it.

Interested?

Visit cairndev.sh and reach out with:

• what you've built;
• your experience with ML/infrastructure;
• why Cairn interests you;
• and what you'd want to build together.