Founding Engineer - Infrastructure (Staff)

About us: Ardent is building data infrastructure scaled for agents on a new primitive: branching. Our first product lets developers and agents clone TB-scale Postgres DBs in under 6s, so coding agents can test their work against a 1:1 copy of prod. Vikram started the company after scaling an AI Data Engineer to $200K in ARR and realizing the agents couldn't test any generated code without fast, cheap, scalable clones of production state. Our CTO Evan saw the same problem across 20 years in data at Netflix, Mailchimp, and Capital One. We solve hard problems: compute scaling, storage branching, merges, and reliability at scale. We want to build the most efficient sandboxing layer for agents on data infrastructure in the world, across every data system. We're growing fast and backed by top investors including YC, Crane, Active Capital, and the founders of core data infrastructure companies like Atlan. About the role: We're a small SF-based team looking to hire a strong infrastructure engineer to scale our current customer deployments and develop a specialized branching engine for data infrastructure. As a founding engineer you'll work across the stack and directly with customers, shaping the product from its earliest stages. This is a challenging role where you'll work with the low-level internals of Postgres and replication, and help build new primitives like database merge, diff, and promote across every data system we support. What you should expect, with example tasks: - In your first 30 days, build an autoscaling engine from our control plane to minimize compute overprovisioning across all customer deployments while maintaining performance and reliability - Use Postgres page deltas to create new artifacts like branches and merges that work at TB and PB scale - Build a branching engine that creates branches of Postgres in under 6s with any amount of metadata, at 1/4 the footprint, that runs on any customer cloud What we're looking for: - Strong fundamentals in computer science and architecture design - Comfortable working across the stack and wearing many hats - Deeply interested in solving new infrastructure problems for agent workloads - Past experience scaling high-load, fault-tolerant distributed systems with Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres, and other data systems - Strong beliefs, loosely held - We work 5-6 days/week General Stack: Postgres, Kafka, K8s, compute scaling, etc. We do a lot of infra scaling work and new ways of working with postgres