Founding AI Quality & Release Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 21, 2026.
Our client is a seed-stage enterprise AI company building autonomous data agents that execute complex engineering workflows inside customer-controlled cloud environments. Founded by early employees of a leading cloud data platform, the approximately 20-person team helps data organizations compress work that once took months into hours.
This is the company's first dedicated quality-infrastructure hire. It is a software engineering role, not a traditional manual QA position. You will write code most days and own the verification and release system that carries every build from merge to customer. Roughly 70% of the role is AI-powered verification through agent-run test harnesses, LLM graders, regression coverage, flake management, and automated release gates. Roughly 30% is release and environment engineering across CI health, artifact publication, deployment pipelines, and reliable demo and staging environments.
You will eliminate silent skips, build fresh-install and upgrade verification, turn escaped bugs into permanent regression tests, expand natural-language UAT executed by coding agents, own release candidates and artifact publication, automate credentials and certificates, and make release readiness visible through trusted system evidence.
Requirements
- 7 to 15 years in quality engineering, release engineering, platform engineering, developer productivity, SDET-adjacent engineering, or a similar software role.
- Production-quality Python and strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Deep fluency with GitHub Actions or an equivalent CI system.
- Genuine interest and practical judgment in LLM-driven and agent-driven verification.
- Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS, cloud deployment mechanics, secrets, credentials, and certificates.
- High ownership and clear technical communication through runbooks, dashboards, retrospectives, and operating policies.
- Full work authorization in either the United States or Canada. Visa sponsorship and transfer support are not available.
Nice to have: TypeScript, Snowflake Native Apps, Playwright, LLM-as-judge or grader design, nondeterministic system testing, and early-stage startup quality infrastructure.
Benefits
- $170,000 to $200,000 base salary, based on qualifications and experience.
- Competitive equity and benefits.
- Remote-first across the United States and Canada.
- Periodic team offsites and flexible hybrid access to the New York City office for local team members.
- High ownership over a founding technical function at a $5M-funded enterprise AI company.