At Unstructured, we’re building the backbone of generative AI—enabling companies to transform PDFs, HTML, Word docs, images, and more into high-performance data pipelines that scale. Our tools are already used by half of the Fortune 500, and our open-source package has been downloaded 26+ million times. Now we’re entering our next chapter—and we’re hiring a Principal Infrastructure Engineer to help lead the charge.

If you're energized by hard problems, want to build systems that matter, and are ready to work alongside serious builders, this is your moment. We're looking for a hands-on technical leader—someone ready to own org-level infrastructure strategy, mentor engineers, and scale our systems with performance, security, and simplicity at the core.

🏢 This role is hybrid in San Francisco—join us in-office 3x a week for deep collaboration, whiteboard sessions, and hands-on impact.

🔧 What You’ll Own & Drive

🛠 Own the Infrastructure Backbone

Architect and scale resilient, secure, and high-performance infrastructure across the organization

Define and execute infrastructure strategy that aligns with product and business goals

🚀 Lead Strategic Initiatives

Drive cross-functional, high-impact infrastructure projects—compute, networking, orchestration, storage

Guide decisions that shape our CI/CD pipelines, observability, automation, and internal platforms

🔥 Solve the Hard Stuff

Own the resolution of persistent, high-stakes infrastructure problems—downtime, latency, deployment bottlenecks

Prevent future incidents through root cause analysis, mitigation design, and proactive reliability engineering

🧑‍🏫 Mentor & Multiply

Mentor engineers across the org and raise the bar on infrastructure best practices

Promote a culture of operational excellence, automation, and reliability

🧭 Drive Cross-Team Alignment

Resolve infrastructure escalations and unblock teams across product and engineering

Ensure internal platforms are simple, scalable, and enable fast product delivery

🏗 Make Foundational Impact

Influence how we build, deploy, and operate software now and in the future

Shape platform capabilities, developer experience, and long-term cloud strategy

🧬 What You Bring

10+ years of experience building and operating infrastructure or site reliability systems at scale

Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and IaC (Terraform, etc.)

Strong Python skills and deep understanding of distributed systems architecture

Proven leadership across multi-team technical strategy and high-stakes decision making

Passion for debugging, systems thinking, and driving infrastructure simplicity

Excellent communicator—you bring clarity to complexity and inspire confidence across teams

💎 Bonus Points

Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, unstructured data workflows, or real-time data pipelines

Deep knowledge of observability tooling, production readiness, or platform security

Startup DNA—you move fast, operate well in ambiguity, and thrive when ownership is high

🌟 Why You’ll Love It Here

Real Impact: You’ll be at the heart of infrastructure powering cutting-edge AI in production

Big Challenges: Tackle hard, novel infrastructure problems in one of the most high-growth areas of tech

Elite Team: Work with sharp, humble engineers who obsess over quality and uptime

In-Person Energy: Be part of our San Francisco office culture—where systems get designed on whiteboards, not just Slack threads

Fast Growth: Help define foundational infrastructure as we scale rapidly into our next chapter