Founding Infrastructure Engineer

About Modern Relay

We're building a lakehouse-native graph engine with git-style workflows. Branch, commit, and merge typed graph data like code. Multi-modal, self-hosted, open source — optimized for on-prem and hybrid context graphs, multi-agent research, and enterprise knowledge systems.

We believe graphs aren't just a database choice — they're the most efficient way to create and distribute knowledge, across people and agents. As fans of Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, we think we're at the start of an explosion of explanatory knowledge, and we want to lead the way.

Our mantra is SOVEREIGNTY. The engine is live and clients are deploying. What's missing is the platform layer that makes every deployment effortless. We invite you to build it with us.

The role

You'll design, build, and operate the components that provide storage, control-plane, and policy services across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments — the layer that turns Omnigraph from an engine into a platform: the control plane and every way it gets deployed. We're hiring an infrastructure engineer who has built control planes for data platforms, from design to implementation. Terraform, Kubernetes, and GitOps are your first languages.

Sovereignty is our core differentiator: customers run Omnigraph in our cloud, their cloud, or their data center, with full control of which model sees which data. Your job is to make that promise real, repeatable, and one click away.

Our style

We've optimized the whole company to run on agents — Hermes, Claude Code, Devin; Slack wired for agent-driven development. You won't hand-crank infrastructure.

You'll build it to run on rails: declarative, GitOps-driven, agent-operable, cluster lifecycles as code.

What you'll own

Four systems to build and run — not four dashboards to babysit.

Control plane

The cluster control plane for Omnigraph: one-click cluster creation, prewarmed cluster pools, branch / query / graph visibility, multi-tenancy, and usage and cost observability. You'll take it from working prototype to sellable product.

Deployments

Every shape a customer needs — hosted cloud, customer VPC, on-prem, hybrid. Cluster cloning for client sandboxes and pilots; the Docker and CI rails underneath; an object-storage-first architecture (S3 and friends) end to end.

Security & identity

Supply-chain integrity and a zero-trust posture; identity, SSO, and access policy; secrets and credential flows. You'll drive policy-engine integration (Cedar) into cloud-native authorization environments. Enterprise buyers ask hard infosec questions — you'll have the answers and the architecture behind them.

DevOps / DevEx

GitOps workflows, IaC standards, CI/CD, and environments — the internal platform that lets a small team (and its agents) ship like a big one.

Must have

• Hands-on Kubernetes control-plane work — you build the machinery that manages clusters, not just consume them
• Terraform / IaC as a first language — you think in declarative infrastructure
• Built data-platform infrastructure from design to implementation — data stacks, data-engineering context, and the ops reality behind them
• GitOps as a default — infrastructure changes are code reviews, not tickets
• Security depth — supply-chain / zero-trust thinking, identity and SSO, a real sense for cyber
• A track record designing systems for reliability, correctness, and clear failure semantics
• Agent-native — you live in Claude Code / Codex / Open Code and orchestrate agents to scale your work
• High agency, high ownership — you don't wait, you ship

Nice to have

• Object-storage internals (S3 semantics, conditional writes, S3-compatible backends) and columnar / lakehouse formats (Arrow, Parquet, Iceberg, Delta, Lance)
• Rust, or a willingness to work at the engine boundary
• Enterprise delivery experience — procurement, compliance, on-prem installs behind strict perimeters
• Time in OSS infra / dev-tools communities

Who you'll work with

The founding team, from day one. Direct access to the founders and the engineering team for architecture, escalation, and roadmap. You set the infrastructure strategy; we give you the access and the budget to run it.

Compensation & logistics

• Meaningful equity — this is one of the crucial early roles
• Remote-first, with monthly offsites — relocation to London or SF possible later
• Unlimited token access to Claude, Codex, and every AI tool
• Direct access to the founders, and the budget to build the platform your way

Apply now

If this sounds like you, email [email protected] with the subject line "Application: Founding Infrastructure Engineer". Attach a resume, point us at work you're proud of, and tell us what you'd build first.

We read every application. We write back within a week.