Chief Software Architect

Sailplane is an early-stage AI infrastructure startup focused on developing autonomous systems for managing AI data centers. As the Chief Software Architect, you will lead technical initiatives, design systems, and mentor the engineering team while actively contributing to coding and architectural decisions.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve the control plane for agents: planning and execution loops, workflows, callbacks, and state models
• Implement sandboxing, dry-run/preview modes, invariants, approvals, and rollback strategies so agents can safely change real infrastructure and applications
• Take hierarchical planning / agent research prototypes and build production-grade agents, services and APIs around them (auth, rate limits, quotas, retries)
• Anticipate production system needs (security, networking, SLOs/SLAs) and instrument for reliability and usage via observability (logs, traces, guardrails)
• Guide architecture trade-offs and reason about IP boundaries as an engineering design dimension
• Build, deploy, monitor, and operate LLMs in production on-premises in diverse customer environments and implement MLOps best practices (CI/CD pipelines, containerization, continuous monitoring) to ensure reliable performance
• Lead through influence, setting engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, and on-call practices
• Partner with founders to prioritize what to build next based on customer needs, market demand and technical implementation
• Conduct interviews and evaluate candidates across engineering, product, and design roles, helping build Sailplane's early team