Full Time Caltech Jobs (NOW HIRING)

In the face of rising threats, increasing pressure on affordability, and unprecedented demand for power, Treeswift empowers energy companies to modernize their field work to meet the growth and challenges ahead.
We build physical AI for the field worker: whether on foot or in a vehicle, our technology is an ironman suit for engineers, linemen, and vegetation crews: same worker, same boots on the ground, now operating at 10x productivity. Our platform is powered by cutting edge hardware, sensors (LiDAR, camera, etc...), AI and software designed to revolutionize work in the toughest environments.
Since our first pilot with a utility in June 2024, we've grown fast, now working with three of the five largest utilities in the US. To date, our technology has enabled our customers to reduce wildfire risk, regulatory and outage risk from vegetation, avoid delays and cost overruns in new construction, and accelerate recovery from severe storms.
To tackle this challenge, we are bringing together a team of mission-driven experts with deep industry experience in robotics (Penn, Caltech, CMU) and enterprise software development (Palantir, Stripe, Oracle, MongoDB). We have raised funding from leading investors including Penny Pritzker's Inspired Capital.
We are headquartered in midtown Manhattan, with additional offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia.
Our growth is only accelerating. We're looking for deeply curious and highly ambitious people who want to have a real world impact. Come build the future of (field) work with us.
About the role

• You'll be our first full-time SRE/infrastructure engineer, so we'll look to you for leadership on how to improve and scale our infrastructure to support each part of the platform. Our data pipeline, machine learning training platform, and web app could all benefit from further productionization.
• Help us scale and harden the platform that schedules our pipelines, runs machine learning training, and hosts our web app. We run Apache Airflow on Astronomer with DAGs that orchestrate high-volume processing across AWS and Kubernetes, including machine learning inference inside pipeline tasks. You will build the observability and reliability foundations that let us run this system confidently as customer data volume grows: monitoring, alerting, performance/cost visibility, and clear operational practices.
• Stay curious, collaborative, and cross-functional while also taking ownership of problems. We translate complex, real-world requirements from a critical industry into high-quality data products, so understanding the business holistically is key. We take pride in managing complexity and providing high-fidelity data that our customers can use to make better-informed decisions.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the data platform and engineering teams to understand how changes propagate across pipeline execution (Astronomer-hosted Airflow DAGs), containerized workers (Kubernetes), and AWS services (S3, SQS, Lambda, Step Functions, ECS).
• Design and implement reliability and observability for high-volume pipeline operations, including:
  
  • actionable monitoring/alerting for DAG/task failures and reruns
  • visibility into operational workflows like flight orchestration (including DLQ/failed-message alerting and notification pathways)
  • dashboards and SLO/SLI definitions focused on correctness, throughput, and pipeline health
• Own CI/CD guardrails for production changes: build/deploy validation and safe rollout mechanics for Astronomer deployments (image builds pushed to ECR, and Airflow configuration updates via Astronomer CLI variable updates)
• Make machine learning inference operations more reliable and observable:
  
  • instrument inference runs executed inside pipeline runners (model checkpoint resolution, S3 sync behavior, thresholds and fallback behavior, and output correctness)
  • add operational visibility for inference outcomes (e.g., unknown classification rates, fallback usage, and failure modes)
• Create operational tooling and continuously improve systems ('leave it better than you found it'), including:
  
  • runbooks, incident learnings, and engineering standards for debugging at scale
  • automate away toil in deployment and operations workflows as we learn what hurts most

On-call / incident response
There is not currently an established on-call rotation for this platform, and the pipelines do not require real-time processing. That said, you'll still help lead reliability improvements and operational readiness-so the team has faster diagnosis, better alerts, and safer releases when issues do occur.
What we're looking for

• You are an experienced software engineer where the last 7-10 years required significant time on observability, systems/infrastructure engineering, SRE, or DevOps (ideally in a cloud environment).
• Ability to reason about architecture end-to-end and articulate your thoughts with product impact in mind (data movement, execution, failure handling, and operational visibility).
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform and similar) and using it to deliver reliable environments.
• Experience with container orchestration and debugging in practice (Kubernetes and/or ECS/container-based deployments).
• Strong Linux debugging skills and demonstrated ability to investigate production issues with logs/metrics and clear hypotheses.
• Empathy and communication: you can collaborate effectively with engineers across teams (especially the data platform team) and explain tradeoffs clearly.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working in early-stage or fast-moving environments where ownership and processes evolve quickly.
• Experience with Apache Airflow and/or Astronomer.
• Experience with AWS, although other cloud providers are fine. (DuploCloud experience is also helpful.)
• Experience with geospatial/imagery/lidar/point-cloud style domains.
• ML Ops skills (model deployment/inference reliability, packaging, CI/CD for model artifacts, and operational observability for inference pipelines).

Work location
This is a full-time, hybrid role based out of our Lower Manhattan, NYC office (2 days per week in person, currently pinned to Tuesdays and Wednesdays).
Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity package
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your eligible dependents
• Life insurance and short- and long-term disability coverage
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave to support all new parents
• Flexible, unlimited paid time off
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• Free OneMedical membership
• Commuter benefits
• Snacks, goodies, and team lunches provided twice a week to keep you fueled and connected with your colleagues.

Salary
The estimated salary range for this position is $160,000 - 220,000 USD. Total compensation for this position is determined by skills, qualifications, relevant work experience, location, and other factors. This salary estimate excludes the value of any potential bonuses; the value of any benefits offered; and the potential future value of any long-term incentives. This information is provided per the New York City Human Rights Law. Please note that the range provided is applicable only to New York City-based applicants. Base compensation may vary if the work location is outside of New York City.
Treeswift is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law.
If you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, whether it be alternate forms of material, accessible meeting rooms, etc., please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.